1. Once rammed a button hook up your nostril.
A button hook has a graspable handle, and was once used to wrap an elastic loop around a shoe button, back when a shoe looked more like a soft boot. Shoes once featured a ridiculous number of buttons, anywhere between fifteen and forty. Because people never exercised, it was impossible for them to bend over and button a shoe without some kind of aid. At that time women had very tiny feet, four to five inches in length, and as in China, their feet remained small owing to this particular form of wrapping, and also, of course, to a steady diet of coal pellets, buckeyes, and horehound drops.
2. Slaps your dog.
Elder cruelty toward animals has been widely documented, which is why God has made old people weak, so when they go to slap your dog, it doesn’t hurt as much. This same mystifying logic of the Creator is in effect with nuns, but nuns have learned to compensate with rulers. However, no one has done the much needed research on why old nuns have such waxy, white faces, which when you think of it is more frightening.
3. Bakes cookies and eats them herself.
There is no known instance of a genuine “granny” preparing something so normal as chocolate chip cookies. Instead, look for sand tarts or strange, rock hard anise biscuits. Other habits, such as wadding tissue and jamming it up the sleeve or down into the bodice, setting pin curls with stale beer, and eating milk-drowned, leftover popcorn for breakfast, meet with the very definition of grumbling, the single raised eyebrow scowl, and of course, the dithering repetitions, to define the genre.
4. Often reminds your father that he “slipped the diaphragm”.
It’s a grandmother’s duty to maintain family traditions, even those the family may attempt to laughingly dispatch with bourbon, perkies, or Nyquil. For example, take the sacred relationship between mother and son. What else can produce the whining, snarling, outrage of his accusation or the pained, ejaculatory tremolo of her shock? Nothing can, except perhaps, accidentally chopping off a foot or taking a well stroked golf ball to the temple. With grandma, every holiday offers a variation on “The Pieta,” and as with the piñata, is it a mystery that people think to celebrate with a stout stick?
5. Passes gas during church services.
Places where digestive gases should never be released include all of them on this gay, blue marble we call earth, but closed spaces where it may prove impolite and sometimes impossible to make a quick exit, and where someone sees fit to make an exploratory arpeggio, are particularly vulnerable. Fortunately for them, most old people are hard of hearing, and statistics show that fewer than one out of forty nine are aware of these abrupt occurrences. One would think scientists could devise a meter which could be strapped to the wrist, which would reveal evidence of emissions, or even better the magnitude of the quake on its way.
6. Frequently interrupts people as they try to compliment you.
Interruptions are a special category. First, we know that grandmother is querulous, which loosely translated means that she asks a question, and when you, stammering, provide some kind of stupid answer, she interrupts you again with another question. Suffice to say, it’s annoying to be picked off in the middle of a story, by a friend, let alone an old broad that mutters huh under her breath, and waddles like a duck that shit its pants. But face it, we all know people who begin every single God-blessed sentence with and, and talk really, really slowly. And those people are much worse. The thing is, once Great Granny’s bad behavior is underway, she expects you to just walk out on her nelly ass without any more ceremony. It’s her way of telling you that if you don’t want to discuss the Big War or the Depression, you should keep your fat face focused on the computer.
7. Tuneless humming.
Psychological studies reveal a definitive correlation between grandmothers who exhibit this peculiar habit, freaking humming without having any particular tune in mind, and its corollary, padding mindlessly up the back stairs, to the second floor john, with a tiny kitten in hand, and a so called “intent to flush.” So don’t whimper when these situations arise, without first acknowledging that you got your heads up here. Also if you notice that a kitten is missing, always check the refrigerator, because old loony tunes might have socked it in there when she was going for a beer.
8. Hugs with her fist.
Fortunately this habit, like ululating, is limited to foreign born grandmothers, in the main. But occasionally Grannies born and raised in Minnesota , whose lives railroaded them into positions of wealth and power, exhibit this trait, and simultaneously, the old stick straight up the ass trait. Having had a great deal of breathtakingly, bad behavior flung in her direction, often causes a granny, even one of those good hearted grannies, to become permanently appalled. Mideastern grannies, who ululate and fling themselves against the walls and fuck up the coffee table, act this way because of those black bags they live inside, and because of the intense, internal shrieking that never stops. “Stands with a fist” was the name of the woman who fluffed her hair in Dances with Wolves.
9. Insists that you begin a stamp collection.
Enough said. But allow me to elaborate. A grandmother is by definition someone who wants to buy you a coloring book when you want a Blackberry. When you bare your midriff, granny thinks you’ve outgrown your shirt, and looks for a classic cardigan in the same color. She reminds you that skimpy things look cheap, and that some styles never go out of fashion, which you know, is a bunch of crap. The thing is; she may want to discuss the stamp collection, about which you care not one hoot, while you are trying to entertain friends. Worse, she may want to meet your friends, to whom she will address careful, genteel remarks, like “What does your father do?” Afterward your friend may sit on the couch, feel a lump, and discover that Granny has done her pack rat thing, and stored a Tupperware of ancient green Jello under the cushion.