Franny Got New Drapes

I think insanity runs in my family and I am frightened.

Many of my relatives, living or dead, I am starting to see.... are freaks.

My Grandmother, until her death several months ago insisted that "Franny," her next door neighbor for 30 years, would steal the tulip bulbs from her garden at night and replant them in her own. "Nobody has that shade of a Tiger Lily but me." She would scream.

She also insisted that Franny would systematically cut the buttons off my Grandfathers winter jackets in the back hallway when she came to borrow a cup of sugar. Grandma would disappear into the kitchen to fetch the "cover up condiment," and Franny would apparently be madly hacking off buttons with a scissors she brought just for the occasion.

"They were expensive brass buttons, and her son had a military uniform she could use them for....." Grandma would snap after she left.

She began hiding the jacket.

Franny was a red headed Lucille Ball look-a-like who was drunk 100% of the time and smoked three packs of Camels a day. She could hardly stand up let alone cut a button off a coat without amputating all of her fingers.

I clearly remember being about five- years- old sitting on the back stairs watching Franny teeter back and fourth against the door frame smiling at me through watery eyes with lipstick smashed on her teeth.

As a kid, when I would be telling my Grandma a story, thinking she was listening to me and that I had her undivided attention, she would look out the porch window and say "I see Franny got new drapes"...

I also remember sitting on the floor at Grandmas with my brother watching television only to hear my Grandma scream..”I know what you two are doing! Get those hands out of the cookies”!Not even near the kitchen..we would just stare at each other, shrug our shoulders and continue to watch Scooby-Do.

Grandma had many quirks. She used to insist I sleep with no underwear on (only loose PJ pants) because “a vagina needed to breathe..if you don't, you'll just tear that thing right up"

She also refused to leave the house until she had “a good healthy BM”. We would wait for hours playing games on her front porch until we heard her light a match. Then we could leave.

I often wondered what constituted a “healthy BM” in her eyes. A floater? A diver? A sinker? Did it go according to shape, size or color? Smell or length? Did she measure it? Weight it? Poke it with a stick? Photograph it? Chart it? Make a list of averages?

She was consumed with stools and GAVE my mother and her sisters caster oil enemas (key word here is GAVE) until they were 15 years-old. I asked my Mother why she never refused.

She blinked and said “I guess I never thought to”. (Twighlight Zone music playing here…)

I also have a cousin named Karen, whom back when I was about 19, thought that Satan spoke to her through the kitchen table and that her OBGYN was following her a week after giving birth to her son.

Did no one think to themselves… “Gee, maybe we should call a doctor? Maybe she has some postpartum depression, or that she is just frickin INSANE”?? Rumor has it that she ran away with her children and was never seen or heard from again. Did anyone call the police? Was there an ongoing investigation? Hell nooooooo…

Here’s my Mother on the phone with a relative: “So.. Karen never showed up at either of her parents funerals…ya…sure, no idea. Sort of rude donch know?? Ya alrighty, you betcha…bye-bye.”

God help me if I was ever kidnapped.

"Yeah did ya hear? Lisa never showed up after school??... geez...been three weeks now, sorta rude dontcha think? Teenagers..she's such a rebel”….

In the meantime I would be found 30 years later as a maggot infested bag of bones in a 6 foot hole at Black-Dog Park, found by some horrified jogger whose dog stumbled across my skeleton still sporting a plastic head-band and a monogrammed sweater from 1982.

As for Karen, personally I think her equally freaky family or illegal immigrant ass of a husband killed her and she is buried in her a yard in Vienna VA.

I may have been born into a freaky family tree, but thank God I grew my own branch.