Ups and Downs in Endstage Mayberry

Life here in endstage Mayberry has been a study in ups and downs. On Sunday, my grandmother and uncle arrived for a visit; my uncle will be staying for several weeks, but Der Graminator has already set off for Tennessee to pick up her sister for a visit to yet more relatives in Ohio. To celebrate their arrival, my mother and PC hosted a dinner. My mother smoked and drank while PC manned the stove, and thank God for that. I'd rather have my mother in an alcoholic stupor than eat her culinary abominations, creations so foul as to make a goat heave.

I haven't seen my grandmother in three years and my uncle in eight. They both look far older than I remember. My uncle in thinner and greyer, and my grandmother is unsteadier on her feet, a fragile Russian nesting deal wading furiously and stubbornly against the implacable will of gravity. Her children have been pleading with her to use a cane, but she sees it as a concession to age and so refuses in the name of age and vanity. I see it for the folly that it is, and yet I also secretly applaud her for it, recognizing in it echoes of my own ultimately useless rebellion against the cloying, obnoxiously nettlesome familial will. I know it's foolish to admire it, that it can only end with broken bones and shattered independence, but a voice whispers that it's better to die unbowed by the weight of the best intentions. How can it speak otherwise when my grandmother has done more in her life than her children have ever achieved in theirs by "doing what's best"?

While they're huddled in their provincial, dead-end lives, she's driving through the mountains with her sister on a final sibling moot and making plans to take me to Oktoberfest in Helen, Georgia, because she wants one last road trip with her sunless, dour, most mule-headed chick before her weakness overwhelms her will.

So, I had steak and shrimp and collard greens and got to be Grammy's little granddaughter again, probably for one of the last times, and then I came home to discover that the cable box had frozen solid. No amount of fiddling with the buttons or swearing creatively at the remote could persuade it to change the channel. So, I spent a few minutes glowering at Animal Planet and put in a DVD.

When the situation still hadn't improved by this morning, I called the cable company. The very efficient tech told me that the box probably needed a reboot to finish installing a firmware update. Sure enough, I rebooted the box, and the cable emerged from its coma. Thank God. I was having visions of missing premiere week while the cable technicians took their time making a service call. Yes, I know I could've watched the shows on the Internet, but TV looks better on TV.

Disaster averted, I went to the grocery store, where I discovered that creme pumpkins were on sale--four bags for five dollars. Manna from heaven. It was shaping up to be a fabulous day.

Until I came home and discovered a leak in the bathroom roof. The drama and unexpected expenses never end. I'm not sure if the leak isun the plumbing or the roof, but it bites either way. PC says he'll fix it as soon as the rain abates, but that isn't supposed to happen until Monday. Maybe. Hence, a cooking pot is currently catching the water as it drips desultorily from the ceiling.

Still, I have a roof over my head, even if it does leak, and food in my pantry, so I can't complain too loudly.