Meet my family - they're like a "Meet the Parents" movie gone wrong. We've got a Jesus freak, a forty-something year old with middle child syndrome, a stripper with blue hair and an alcoholic dwarf. Oh, and I haven't even addressed my grandparents yet.
My grandma is like Marie from "Everybody Loves Raymond". She's nosy, she intervenes and loves to gossips. She's a seventy-one year old gossip. She steals packets of mayonaisse from Chick-Fil-A when she doesn't even eat there. She'll steal handfuls of packets and stick them in her purse. If they catch her she'll just plead that she's senile and doesn't know what's going on. She'll pick a fight with an employee at a grocery store over the price of toilet paper. She's crazy.
My grandfather is eighty years old and he's the worlds biggest pessimist, a wanna-be food critic, and an avid dead bug collector. He has jars and jars of dead things: the skeleton of a mouse he found in an old shoe, the body of a praying mantis with a dismembered head. When I come to the door and he comes to greet me with a smile on his face and a jar in his hand, I know what that means. I swear insects are one of the only thing that keeps that man happy anymore.
My grandma hates wasting things. I think it has to do with his growing up around the time of the Great Depression. I've watched him finish off a piece of bread covered with mold. He just toasts the bread and scrapes it off. I've seen him drop a bun on the dirty floor, dust it off and eat it. That's my grandpa.
My grandma and grandpa are about at different as can be, which makes a little bit of sense considering the situation. My grandma is my dad's mom and my grandpa is my mom's dad. My parents met when their parents starting dating. It's pretty cool except for the fact that my dad has to see his ex-wifes father all the time.
One of the only obvious things my grandparents have in common is hoarding. They live in a three bedroom house - the house my grandfather raised his three children in over forty years ago. It's a three bedroom house and yet, they can only sleep in one room because the other two rooms are piled, practically to the ceiling with stuff. My grandmas little room has a bed in it, but the bed is stacked with all of her belongings - extra packages of paper towels, old pens, a huge stuffed animal of a dog with an ear missing. That woman has everything. You name it, she's got it.
My grandfathers room is stacked with books. Books stacked on bookshelves line the walls to the point where, you can't even see the wallpaper anymore. He's got boxes and boxes of old newspaper and what everyone else sees as junk. He's also got their basement floor covered in his stuff. Old, broken bicycles, an eight pack of pepsi bottles from years and years ago, probably an antique of some sort. But he won't get rid of anything.
So my grandmas stuff fills up an entire bedroom and storage garage. My grandpas fills up a whole house. But they love eachother and I love them. I love the ongoing oddities of my family.
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