My Grandma is Crazy and other Grandparent Humor

Everybody's got at least one wacky relative. We defy you to find one as, shall we say, spirited, as Hattie.

"My friends aren't welcome at the bar?"

Hattie nodded silently. Her friends knew what was coming. They'd seen that silent nod before. If her new boss had any idea that he'd just pulled the pin on a live grenade, he might have had the good sense to dive under a table.

So her lesbian lover and other friends weren't classy enough for the upscale restaurant where she poured drinks? No problem. Without a word, Hattie picked up a chair and smashed every glass and bottle within swinging distance. Then she threw one of the broken bottles at her boss as she explained where he could go and what he could do with himself once he arrived.

Billy actually has a very sweet grandmother. She bakes brownies, knits mittens, and generally makes June Cleaver look like a cross between Ma Barker and Lady Macbeth.

But this isn´t about her. This is about Billy's other grandmother. The one who once met a missionary at the door and kicked him in the groin.

Hattie is no one's idea of a perfect grandmother. Not even her own. In fact, she threatens to stab the first grandchild who calls her "Grandma." At 72, she says, she´s too $#@! young to be anyone's grandmother.

Still, I love my former mother-in-law. Former only in the legal sense. You divorce your wife, I have found, but not her mother. Hattie remains a formidable figure in my life, and more important, in the life of my son.

Not that she's always easy to love. The woman is feather-plucking insane. She's a self-absorbed hedonist who parties until dawn, a potentially violent crackpot who doesn´t take an ounce of crap from anyone, and she has the rap sheet to prove it.

Libelous statements? You don´t know this woman. She read this and said I'm being too wimpy. She's all I've described and more — and proud of it.

When Hattie comes to town, you're in for a wild ride. And you better stock up on the booze. Fortunately, she always sends a check for $200 before she visits. This gives me the time and money to buy the required varieties of alcohol, including Miller Genuine Draft. Bottles, not cans, thank you. These have to be properly chilled before her arrival. Yet even when she's drunk, she's still classy. She doesn´t so much as belch.

You might get the idea at this point that Hattie is a bit of booze hound. Maybe, to an extent. I have come to realize, however, what she is truly addicted to is experience. She does everything to glorious excess. She doesn't have meals. She has feasts that, like everything else in her life, go on for hours.

To say she loves listening to jazz is like saying Napoleon loved acquiring real estate. Charlie Parker puts her in a hypnotic trance, and Sarah Vaughan sets her to screaming like a punk teen at a heavy-metal concert. Family members in their 20s and 30s have been known to pass out from exhaustion trying to follow Hattie as she darts through the city, going from one jazz club to the next.

She is loud, boisterous, profane, ill-mannered, and ill-tempered, with more vices than most rock stars. You can say a lot of nasty things about her, but one thing you can't say is that she's boring. In fact, saying she's boring would be the only thing she would consider defamatory.

Do I want my son to emulate her? Heck, no. What kind of father do you take me for? Even Hattie would be mortified if I thought she was any kind of role model.

Still, I admire her lust for life, her disregard for all manner of authority, and her exceptionally low — to the point of nonexistent — BS threshold. I would be proud if she genetically passed any of these qualities on to my son.

Properly channeled, those can be admirable traits. And even when improperly channeled, they´re certainly not boring.

(Ed Hutchinson, not the writer's real name, lives in a small Northwestern town. We've allowed the use of the pseudonym for this story to avoid any undue spotlight on his family.)