Granny’s pages

Brighid Wise

March 9, 2008

A.B.’s view of the world has gotten on my nerves. Tally and I bought a second hand computer and we’re going to make sniveling A.B. put our pages on the internet, too. Right now Tally is tapping in my words, but before too long I’ll be doing it myself, since she is teaching me how to type using more than two fingers.

You’ll notice I understand the use of the paragraph. Fact is, the damn machine will do that automatically, all A.B. has to do is hit the "enter" key. I think it shows he fears change.

A.B. has gotten out of control with his site. It’s like living in an ant farm, and frankly, a lot of people are starting to avoid him. He thinks he’s covered people’s real ID’s but we all know who he’s talking about, and he’s turned into the leading gossip in the hills.

I’m also tired of seeing that little silver recorder of his, seeking crap in my own words. I told his Honey if she ever buys him something like that again I’m going to buy him a drum set for their garage.

I’ve known A.B. since he was a telltale bulge in my granddaughter’s jeans. I can tell you everything about him. I know more about him than he knows about himself by a peck. From now on, when he gets on with his NHRN crap, we’re going to tell the world something about him. To be fair to the boy, he’s already told you the most of the worst of himself. I think that’s because he can’t help it. He’s pathetically, even pathologically, honest. Besides, I think he has the need to be forgiven for his sins, puny and silly as they are. It’s possible if I slapped him on the forehead and said, " Deinde, ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti" he might get better and stop writing altogether.

It’s an open secret, you probably even know it, that A.B.’s Honey keeps him looking and acting like a normal person. He does well enough at his work, which suits him since it’s about safety and he’s afraid of everything. Other than that, though, A.B.’s an absolute twitterpate. His Honey is smart, sensible, and decent. She doesn’t want kids yet, and I don’t suppose she ever will, and why should she when she lives with Peter Pan.

Here’s a story about A.B. to make up for some of the skeletons he’s set shivering in local closets: He was almost 16, had been down in the youth authority and then the group home, and he came back feelin’ like he didn’t need to unbutton his pants to find his jigger anymore. He bragged about a fight he’d been in at the group home, leavin’ out the fact that it was a girl and she beat the stuffin’ out of him. Somehow even getting his ass kicked by a girl made him feel tougher. I blame the local schools, which even then tried to discourage kids from fistfights. When I was a kid even the girls settled disagreements with boney little girl fists.

So, A.B. is struttin’ around the place like he’s the cock of the walk and I’m feeding the chickens and when I go in the tack room and lift the plywood on the grain barrel I see a little squirrel peeking out.

I drop the lid and run to the door and yell "help, A.B., there’s a bobcat or somethin’ in the grain barrel! Help your poor old Granny, A.B.!"

He comes runnin’ around the corner like he’s got a big S on his chest and says, "let me see."

"It’s in the grain barrel! I’m so scared!"

A.B. is scared shitless, but he reaches out like he’s holdin’ a teacup he lifts the plywood which caused the squirrel to scratch at the lid.

"It’s still in there," he says, and I can see beads of sweat between the pimples on his face.

"Sure, it’s a bobcat," I say, and I hand him a single jack hammer weighing about four pounds. "Kill it for me."

A.B. grabs the hammer and holds it back with one hand and flips the plywood off with the other and he swings the hammer into the barrel and the squirrel runs up his arm and tap dances on his head a second to get footing then leaps into the rafters of the shed and is gone. A.B. drops the hammer in the grain barrel and screams and dances around slapping himself.

I laughed so hard I had to run out and drop my skivvies before I wet myself. I went back in the tack shed and A.B. is just standing there, sobbing a little.

"Did ya git him?"

"No," he says, crying a little more.

"Did he git you?"

"No, it isn’t that."

"What happened?"

He bawled out, "I crapped my pants."

I laughed and laughed, and said, "well, grab the single jack and let’s get you cleaned up," but he was afraid to reach into the barrel again.

Fact is he crapped himself every so often in those days.  He's still what I'd call "excitable".

Anyway, there was a big crap smear in his skivvies, like one of those Rorschach tests, and I didn’t clean them but made a big fuss about the smell and had him tack them up on the sunny side of the cabin, where the heat baked the crap into the cotton. After than, every time he would start to strut I’d tell him, "fetch me your squirrel skivvies, I think you’re starting to get too big for the whities you have on .

Funny thing about those skivvies, the waist band rotted away first, then the clean cotton got ragged, and finally, after a long time, the shitty part finally rotted away.

Too bad, if I still had them I might be able to wave them at this internet thing he’s doing.