Grandma runs me over

On Thursday my great-aunt hired me to take my great-grandma out for a little while. These two charming women have somewhat of a Mrs. Bates/Miss Bates relationship, not quite that extreme but sometimes close.

My darling great-grandmother is turning 99 (that's right, ninety-nine) in just a couple weeks, so getting her around in not exactly easy, and neither is talking to her since she can't quite hear and her short-term memory is suffering somewhat. But still I love her, and so was glad of the opportunity of taking her to pick up her hearing aid, getting some Arbie's, and do some grocery shopping. My great-aunt packed a cooler full of ice, cups, and coke for the trip.

The visit to the grocery store was by far the highlight of the adventure. We got grandma into one of those jazzy scooters with a shopping cart attached and just let her go. She insisted on following me though, so for most of the trip I was ghosted by an old lady on a scooter.

Down one aisle she said that we needed some coke, so I picked up a box of cans and said, "Grandma, I'm going to put this in your cart instead of mine." She responded "Ok." Then rammed me over with her scooter. She just held down the go lever, pushing me back while I've got this big thing of soda in my hands. "Grandma, stop! Stop!" But she didn't really hear me, so I had to reach over and pull her hand off the controls.

Then we had a big debate over marshmallows. Growing up during the Depression made my Grandma very conservative with money and food. She needed marshmallows but couldn't stand the fact that a bag was almost $3. Thank goodness for Western Family.

After settling on which bag of marshmallows (I was able to convince her that the fruit kind, already horrible [hence the reduced price], taste particularly nasty in chocolate) we found the rest of the aisle a-litter with new merchandise and carts (and one poor bloke who was having a real tough time deciding on pasta).

So I said, "Grandma, we'll have to go back that way. Do you think you can reverse straight all the way back?" She looked at me and said, "Yeah." then clenched her fist around the reverse lever and shot backwards, without even looking, straight into the jell-O and cake mixes. And she just kept pushing reverse so the scooter kind of scratched and skidded along the shelves for a bit before I was able to get her to stop. "Grandma! Whoa! Stop!" When she finally heard me she just put her hands in her lap and waited.

I started cleaning up the wreck, but a real nice employee came over and said, "I'll take care of this, don't worry." Which, if we analyze the subtext, would sound more like, "I can see she's a handful, so keep a closer eye on her and stop wrecking my store."

The whole fiasco was fun though. I'm glad I went. I love her dearly. Maybe I'll get her a jazzy for her birthday.