Our Constance

For my grandmother, on her 90th birthday

On her ninetieth birthday, there are many appropriate ways to celebrate Constance, my maternal grandmother, the last of ten children who inherited the grim task of caring for her parents before they both died prior to enduring a solo, six-week boat ride from England to America seventy years ago, and then moved in with her sister, a lady she has long designated as Our Brenda.

Nana, as I grew up calling her, never met a story she didn’t like re-telling. Not merely re-telling it but repeating it in the exact same order with the exact same details each time the old saw came to mind, the precision so accurate that on the unlikely occasion she omitted one minor aside that had become intrinsic to her yarn, anyone within earshot was inclined to question its exclusion. There are tales from her time as an assistant at a doctor’s office where the physician in charge was fond of completing The New York Timescrossword puzzle (the only way he existed in this world if you listen to Connie), tales of eating rationed potatoes and eggs during World War II, and tales from when my grandfather shook down the manager at a local diner for mistreating one of the waitresses, a teen who doubled as his eldest daughter, by assaulting the man in charge, the kind of shocking retro violence any kid craves hearing repeated. No tales, even ones she concluded and acknowledged were pointless, remained off limits. Most family members grew mock-critical of the reprises over time, but on occasion a new anecdote crept in or a fresh portal to Nana’s past surfaced, her sometimes telling stories during a dinner in her living room or dessert in the den, a clump of mashed potato or cake rolling out of her mouth as she laughed uncontrollably at how hilarious we found fresh details she realistically brought to life often without noting their signature absurdity.

Like when Our Brenda asked her husband, Our Roy, to follow a man into a restroom to confirm the size of the stranger’s penis. I believe I’m exaggerating the outcome, but it was something akin to an elephant trunk holding a javelin. Sidebar: Nana refers to her siblings collectively, Our Constance’s means of preserving a huge family history that has long lived most vividly in her storytelling, whether documenting Our Beryl or Our Phyllis or Our David or Our Peter. One of her best friends has only ever been known as Our Bubbles.

I didn’t know my grandfather, but Nana’s second husband, Fred, has been the subject of several chestnuts. Like the night he picked up a pizza and carried it in the house vertically, the slices collectively enduring a topping rapture inside the cardboard box. Or when Fred’s cousin, a wealthy thrifter, repurposed a get-well card Nana mailed her by taping construction paper over the entire thing and re-gifted it to her as the following year’s birthday card along with some half-rotten apples from her yard. Or the time I caught Fred eating a stick at the foot of the driveway because he didn’t want to toss it in the woods, later commenting on how fresh it had tasted while eating a sandwich Nana made him for lunch before Nana said it wasn’t the first time he’d consumed his yardwork. Nana has had a knack for surrounding herself with some of laughter’s unheralded leading lights.

People might not be inclined to describe Nana as a comedienne, but her cackle comes to mind as much as the perpetually evolving re-styling of her reddish-orange hair, her obsession with retelling the plot machinations, or over-the-bodice hanky-panky, of cheap romance paperbacks set in Britain, and complaining that the portions at restaurants are too large, chewing slowly and finishing last whenever dining out (in part because she steadfastly insists on not drinking any liquid while eating, one of her strongest nods to limey sociopathology), waiting until the next morning to toss the leftovers she hesitantly decided to bring home. Nana may not be one for emotional warmth — you have to bribe the L-word out of her when ending a phone call — but the quality is unmistakable when she relaxes and prefers conversation to anything else, nostalgia being one of humanity’s Achilles heels.

We’ve spent many hours discussing Alfred Hitchcock, Dennis Price, and Deborah Kerr, a mutual fascination with antiquated cinema long being the easiest way to relate to my elders. We’ve also paused during those conversations as the half dozen clocks in her home chime in meticulously calibrated successive intervals, a symphony dedicated to time that would make Galileo cry if he heard the authentic German cuckoo clock’s shrill chirps segue into imposing grandfather clock gong blasts, the birds quickly in hiding until reappearing to announce a new half hour’s emergence. She claims the wall cacophony blends into the scenery, often talking over it to share a detail those in the room have heard hundreds of times. When she and Fred drafted a will, they asked what I’d like. I picked the grandfather clock, the soundtrack of many joyous times with her.

When I opted not to live on campus during my first six semesters attending UConn, I stayed with Nana and Fred at their rural home ten or so miles west of Storrs. Sober at the time, my primary indulgence was the fresh baked goods on hand each night: cookies, pies, and my grandmother’s greatest concoction, cheesecake with canned blueberry topping. Fred would head to bed around nine, but Nana, a three-cup-or-more-a-day tea drinker, stayed to read while I handled remote control responsibilities.

As my final semesters of evening television viewing with her began, Dave Chappelle’s sketch comedy show debuted on Comedy Central. Despite the indisputable pull of a heaving bosom or throbbing groin in the pages held in her hand, Nana inserted a bookmark when my intermittent laughter became mittent. I didn’t rip bong hits with a dormmate as Clayton Bigsby, a blind, African American white supremacist who became a Ku Klux Klan leader, detailed how much he hated everyone except white people, but instead shared roaring laughter with Our Constance. One night, we watched R. Kelly urinate on women in a music video then hollered as the crippled children in South Park formed a street gang whose opposition retaliated with a drive-by shooting. When Rick James defiled couches and Eric Cartman formed a Neo-Nazi movement, we ate cheesecake and worried our laughter might wake Fred. Wayne Brady would’ve reconsidered choking a bitch if he saw my grandmother’s coughing fit trying to keep it together as the comic’s dark and violent background became apparent during one of the show’s most memorable sequences, Nana unaware of the context but still besotted by the pure nonsense, comparing it to BBC goofiness from years prior.

Her evening hysterics led to sharing them with Fred at the breakfast table on Thursday mornings. Imagine the confused man trying to comprehend a racial draft (“O.J. Simpson became white!”) or how Mr. Garrison inserted a gerbil into his sex slave’s rectum during a classroom lecture. Fred loathes anything too risqué but admired the scorched earth approach to mocking the news of the day. Or maybe it beat hearing Nana tell him yet again about the passionate lovemaking of a middle-aged cockney couple on a down comforter in one of her romances, my grandmother uninterested in the historically important scribes from her homeland that I studied in the upstairs guest bedroom. One time, fresh off seeing an episode where Cartman had uncontrollable gas, Nana’s pea soup produced comparable results, Fred confused as I kept farting and enacting a Cartman voice to repeatedly say, “No, really, I’m dry” before cutting another one, a classic case of life imitating fart.

I’ve never trusted people who get offended by pompously acting as if they’re too highbrow to be amused. How else can one make order of the random and meaningless chaos innate to being human than by ridiculing it? During the final phase of what my mother insists was a Pre-London Adam, the twenty-one years before I got suspended from college after broadcasting my turbulent inner dialogue, my closest college buddy was a British lady in her late sixties. We shared compulsive behavior as college roommates — her cleaning the house five days per week while I memorized words in the dictionary — and embraced the offensive comedy bonding us with the ultimate life lesson: laugh at everything.

As someone who traveled throughout America and Europe in her retirement, Nana failed to write down the innumerable stories she loved repeating. In her late eighties, she began to have trouble walking, hearing, and recalling short-term memories, not that the tried-and-true tales of yore faded too much. Worried that one fall could erase her exhaustive mental database, I requested she document her most important creation. In late July 2021, a handwritten recipe arrived in my mailbox (all grammar reproduced intact).

Cheese cake
1 1/3 cups Graham Cracker Crumbs
¼ cup sugar
6 tablespoons melted butter
2 8 oz packs cream cheese
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon grated lemon rind
3 eggs
1 cup dairy sour cream at room temperature
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla

Combine the Graham cracker crumbs and the melted butter. Add ¼ cup sugar into bottom and sides of a 9 inch spring form pan. In a large bowl beat the cream cheese until smooth. Gradually add 1 cup sugar beating until fluffy. Add the lemon rind, add the eggs one at a time until all blended. Pour into the graham cracker crust pan. Bake in a preheated 300 degree oven for 1 hour. Turn off the oven and the leave door ajar for 30 minutes. Combine the sour cream, sugar and vanilla and spread over cheesecake. Return cheese cake to the oven for 30 minutes with door still ajar. This has a tendency to leak in the oven, so put a large thick sheet of foil on shelf below. Happy baking.

I’d once gifted her a magazine subscription for her birthday and used the name Constanzia instead of her own, a source of mirth revisited in mid-September ever since. For however many years I have left, I will repeat the story of watching Chappelle’s Show and South Park with her so people instantly know how cool my grandmother was. In her quest for an immaculately clean and flawless home, it was when she let her guard down to read and watch filth that she achieved a utopian form of adulthood I hope to experience in old age. No cheesecake today, Constanzia; I hope my recipe for how to be a sterling grandmother will suffice in its place. You’ll always be Our Abuelita to me.