My Great-Grandmother
By Michelle Ladonne, Buffalo Grove, IL
12th Grade, A.E. Stevenson High School
How can I even begin to define my great-grandmother? She is a paradox, a contradiction in terms. She is one hundred and fourteen years old, yet still incredibly active. Her morning regimen consists of a brisk six mile jog at around four o’clock in the morning. Then she lifts weights and does crunches for twenty minutes. All this is done in her fluorescent pink jogging suit with silver reflective stripes. She’s quite a sight, this tiny Sicilian woman, all hunched and wrinkled, sporting a shade of pink that even flamingos wouldn’t be caught dead in .
After her fitness routine, she breaks out the cigarettes. My great-grandmother has been smoking a pack a day since she was a teenager, and has never once regretted it. One day I asked her, “Why do you pay so much attention to exercise but smoke so often?” She looked me straight in the eyes and said sternly, “Honey, you have to die of something. Nobody gets out of this alive.” And that is just how she lives her life.
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Who wakes up at three o’clock in the morning? Three o’clock. I’ll tell you who – my great-grandmother does. Whenever I stay at her estate in Sicily, I am awakened at some ungodly hour by the sound of a vacuum cleaner or clanging pots. My initial reaction: What the hell? My secondary reaction: Okay, I can sleep through this. No problem. But then, twenty minutes later, just when I’ve reduced the commotion downstairs to mere background noise, the chaos intensifies. My great grandmother decides to prepare chicken parmesan for lunch, but instead of purchasing the chicken cutlets from the butcher, she finds it necessary to slaughter the poor chicken right outside my window. Nothing like waking up to a nice beheading! At around five a.m., I realize that all hope is lost – both God and my great-grandmother are against me and sleep is just not meant to be.
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It was time for our annual Thanksgiving dinner at the Sicily estate. A select few members of our family were present, only eighty-six this year. My great-grandmother, who had not left the kitchen for forty-two hours brought out course after course of food – the antipasti, soup, salad, vegetables, cheeses, sliced meats, fennel, and other unrecognizable dishes. (Trust me, I’ve learned not to ask if I don’t recognize something, because I’d typically rather not know.)
Then, the crowning moment. Voices hushed and eyes transfixed, we watched, enraptured, as great-grandmother brought out this year’s lasagna. Now, I’m sure you’re wondering, how could one lasagna feed eighty-six people? First, because we already had been eating for hours, we were full enough to crawl up and die at the sight of more food. And second, this was no ordinary lasagna. It was huge. Huge in the sense that it could feed all the starving in Africa and still have enough left over to take on China as well. Anyway, as is the tradition, my great-grandmother began to shovel out chunks of the lasagna to each person. In turn, we all pled, “Just a small piece please,” and she proceeded to dump massive bricks of it onto our plates. (As my great-grandma has reiterated many times, “there’s no such thing as a small piece.”) The process continued, and it is only as she reached my Aunt Marie, that her rhythm came to a screeching halt. “No thanks,” Aunt Marie whispered, barely audible.
“Excuse me?” responded my great grandma in disbelief. The table grew silent, everyone anticipating the inevitable conflict.
“Well,” Aunt Marie answered dubiously, “”I’ve been on Atkins for about two months now, and it seems to be working. I can’t eat carbs. I’m sorry.”
My great grandma said nothing. She gritted her teeth. The color of her face intensified from red, to blue, to purple, and the veins in her neck throbbed. The rest of the family watched closely, waiting fro the inevitable explosion, feeding off the tension. My great-grandma gave her infamous stare of death, one that is intended to traumatize you for the rest of your life. She pulled back her shoulders and went in for the kill. The rest of us leaned in to watch, with the excitement yet the dread of Romans viewing a gladiator tournament, knowing that after a sensational battle, only one would emerge alive.
My aunt laughed nervously. “You know what? Forget the diet. May I have some lasagna please?”
And ever since then, she’s been on Weight Watchers.