Profile of a Person; Draft 1; "Grandma"

My grandma has a funny way of walking when she’s injured, kind of like my dog when he tries to hide the limp he’s gained from running through the briar patches. He’s learned by now that if I see him limping around, I’ll be less inclined to let him play, and he only lives to chase that stick. My grandma reminds me a lot of Joe Montana. She embodies one of his more famous sayings, being, “You gotta play injured.”
One time when I was younger, working with my friend Jack he demonstrated what his father, who is eighty years old, would look like if he didn’t limber up now and again by going out on his runs and rowing sessions in the lake. Jack’s father is eighty years old and spry as ever, but he still needs to warm up for an lengthy amount of time just like a mid seventies Buick needs to warm up for thirty minutes before it will turn over in a Detroit winter. When Jack performed the impression, he kind of stuck his arms out straight to the side, stiff like with his hands about a foot from his body, while he spread his feet about a foot apart with the same stiffness. He made himself look like he was wearing a long sleeve shirt and pants so tight that he couldn’t move at the elbows or knees. I imagined that his impression sort of looked like one of the characters in those white paper doll chains that kids make in grade school to hang up around the ceiling. Jack then added animation to the pose. He shuffled sideways with his stiff legs and arms while making movements similar to those you’d see when someone’s making a snow angel. Jack’s impression basically made his dad look like a crab with arthritis who somehow learned to walk upright. This is the most accurate way I can think of describing the disjointed walking movements of my grandmother. After she’s taken a tumble, she does her best to hide her injuries from my nosy aunts who will give her endless static. But my aunts already know full well that the only person who will ever slow down my grandma is death himself, and at least she won’t have to hear his mouth. While Jack would make the impression of his father, he and I both would have a good laugh at the expense of his old man. The comedy of it came from the unease we felt about our own mortality, we know full well we aren’t above the laws of nature and age. We decided to smile at our mortality while we could, laugh and be grateful, and rejoice in our youth while there was still time. I think my grandmother must smile at death every day the way she works herself at her age. And by her health I guess death has an affinity for simple people with a good sense of humor.
There are three types of people on this planet that can eat the same type of breakfast that my grandmother enjoys every morning without going immediately into glut tonic, lard induced catatonia. Eskimos, aboriginal whale fishers and true blooded, down south, farm and horse folks. Basically, to consume this breakfast, you need to be moving from about five in the morning until around ten at night and burn about five thousand calories per day. The smell of her cooking animal fat in the air at dawn is a better alarm clock than any Sony I’ve ever owned. Bacon has this miraculous way of making you forget about the daily grind. Bacon puts your mind on one track. Eat the bacon. It’s too bad, but most mornings I don’t have any bacon because I don’t burn even half of the calories that she does.
As I stumble into the kitchen every morning to make my delicious breakfast of egg whites and oatmeal, I always notice her still warm frying pan, which contains all of the necessary elements of a well balanced cardiac arrest. She enjoys things that I could hardly touch with a 2 foot grill skewer. Scrapple, thick cut bacon, pork shoulder, ham hock, I could make a list five feet long with other bits of the fattiest parts of creatures that she gets away with consuming like a fish does water. When she’s feeling healthy she’ll have some grits with butter, in a one to one ratio.
If you’ve ever worked a day where by the end you’re dripping in sweat, you’ll know the rigors of my grandmother’s lifestyle, except she lives it that way every day. Not every minute of physical work is enjoyable, but at the end of the day you’ve actually done something with your body that can’t be undone and connects you to the earth. It’s humbling. For me those days of sweating like a sieve, baking in the sun and freezing in the cold all ended after numerous summers and falls spent helping my uncle in concrete contracting and working on the family friend’s turkey farm. This honest work taught me that I am not cut out for a lifetime of that style of work. I guess that’s the nice way of me telling you that I don’t enjoy manual labor, because if you ask my grandma, she’ll you that I’m a wimp. I guess I can stomach her chastising. Being that it comes from a source that makes Rosie the riveter look like a bigger diva than Mariah Carrey.
It is a mystery to nearly everyone my grandmother meets as to what keeps her going. Some say she’s just doing what she can to keep herself busy and not concern herself too much with my granddad, who passed back in two thousand and four. I think everyone is addicted to one thing or another that keeps the embers in their souls bellowed, fueling them through this crazy life. I know that my grandmother is plain and simple addicted, in fact she’s your classic case of simplicity junkie. She’s constantly caught in that feeling you get after you’ve cleaned out the whole basement that you’ve been eyeballing for nine months. My grandma just gets things done. She’s humble and she’s guided by a moral compass more finely tuned than Swiss bearings. She has a genuine respect and regard for authority that I only wish I could poses. One time I was driving her and I came to a stop at a traffic light and let the front wheels roll a few feet past the white line. By the appalled look that my minor traffic offense left on her face you would think that my grandma just realized she was trapped riding shotgun with Billy the Kid.
"Instead of going to the gym all the time, you could do some more shoveling or something around here? That's a work out, huh?" I remind her that working out takes place in a controlled environment and the work she does is prone to injury. Just about once a week I hear a story about how she fell off a horse, or a tractor or a ladder. And she'll never mention that she’s taken a tumble, but I can always tell by the little extra hobbles in her steps that she’s gone down somewhere from some height. Those hobbles send phantom chills through my body, like her DNA is trying to communicate to mine that she's a madwoman and needs to settle down before she's paralyzed. But I know she’ll have it no other way.
“Any work is good work,” she says. I would strongly beg to differ, but I see where she’s coming from. A day you don’t do anything to her is a wasted day. For me it would be a day that you don’t learn anything. In my favorite Jet Li film he systematically defeats all of his enemies in the city and surrounding areas until one day his own family is murdered in cold blood, out of vengeance by a fallen rival school. Jet Li becomes disenchanted by his own selfish ways of blind lust and conquering. He roams the country side, finding a village built on terraced hills and simple customs. The village people teach him to cultivate rice and contribute to the community. He ends up living in the village for several years, enjoying the things he’d taken for granted, the changing of the seasons, building healthy relationships and working for an honest living.
Many of my modern day associates, myself included, have conditioned ourselves to believe that what frees us is attaining those things that are constructed, complex and often convoluted. My grandmother is an example of a timeless humility that is a testament to healthful benefits that are realized by abiding the humbler forces of nature. She knows the steward is wiser than the conqueror.
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