At dinner the other night, Taffy asked me if I remembered my 7th grade history project, where I had to interview my living grandparents. One of the questions was ‘What is the most impressive achievment you’ve ever made.’ And did I remember what she said?
Not missing a beat, I grinned. “Yeah, I remember that one. I got in trouble.”
The dinner guests were surprised. How would this lovely, crazy, woman get a 12 year-old in trouble, they asked? I explained that we had been making our family trees, and talking about remembering the past, and we were supposed to read them aloud to practice public speaking. Everyone else’s grandparents had said things like ‘When my son was born’ or one ‘When I made enough money to bring my grandparents to the US from the old country.’ You know, all that real romantic book crap. “But no, not Taffy,” I said, and then gestured to her. I wasn’t going to steal her thunder!
At that, Taffy smiled and leant forward. “I told the kid, that it was being able to have affairs with four men at the same time, and none of them ever found out about each other! The trick to it was that none of them lived in Cleveland!”