Rev Your Wings
I had to take a ride eastward to Stafford Springs this afternoon—I jokingly call it Stafforbama because if the town was located in The Heart of Dixie, nobody would question it—to install a new printer for my nana. At age eighty-five, she primarily uses the device to print weekly NFL picks my grandfather (Fred) and I make throughout the autumn and winter. I sent her the Super Bowl pick sheet I created to use when devirginizing her new Hewlett-Packard.
“What’s your Wi-Fi password, Nana?”
“I think it’s my phone number, but it should be in the notebook over there.” She flipped through the seventy-page college-ruled book, three total pages with writing on them, and had all the other passwords written down except the one in question.
“Ma! How do you not know the password?” my mother (Harry) asked Nana.
“Would you two go bicker downstairs so I can get this done?”
I bought a pair of tickets to a Drive-By Truckers concert while waiting for the software to download (thankfully not needing the Wi-Fi password). Then I invited Nana back up to show her how things worked.
“You click this icon, print, and then pick the new printer from the drop down.”
“She’s not gonna remember that,” Harry said.
“Well, she’s done this before!” I said as if Nana weren’t sitting on the guest room bed, endless Hess toy trucks arranged to cover the furniture in the room. (I swapped the location of two trucks to see how long it would take Fred to notice.)
“I know how to print in Gmail and Word,” Nana told me.
“Okay, cool. Let me print a test copy.” I waited until it landed on the tray then handed it to her. “Can you please read that for me?”
“‘Dirka dirka dirka.’ Real funny, Adam. You could’ve just called me an idiot. I don’t know why I use the computer.”
“Oh, stop. It was just a joke.”
I ordered her an extra black ink cartridge—joking that I’d be using her credit card for my future Amazon purchases—and we headed downstairs to chat for a bit in the sunroom. Fred walked across the deck after being dropped off by his buddy.
“How was your lunch date?”
“It was almost awful,” Fred told us. “Dickie wanted to go to Olive Garden. Bahh! We went to Lulu’s instead, but he wasn’t that hungry, so we both had clam chowder and a lemonade.”
“Because when I’m hungry, I only get what the other person is having,” I joked.
Fred departed to put his coat in the closet, and I noticed a golden winged logo on the back of his gray and white shirt.
“I was wondering if you wanted this,” Fred mentioned to Harry, holding said shirt after changing.
“What the hell’s on the back of it?” I asked him. “Is that your lesbian biker shirt?”
“I’m not sure what the damn logo is!” he said while laughing. “I got fifty other shirts upstairs, but I wore this thing.”
“I don’t want that!” Harry told him in between laughs.
“Were you and Dickie actually out on your choppers with a few dozen lesbians instead of eating lunch?”
Nana, eager as always to enunciate more syllables than everyone in the room combined, began telling us about another article of clothing Fred disliked.
“Well, he’s got this hremmphhrrm,” she said as if nobody noticed, “but he can’t stand it so it’s yours if you want it.”
“What did you say about his hremmphhrrm?”
“She’s so busy trying to tell every detail of this story that she’s not even pronouncing all the words,” Harry said.
Nana moved on, asking me if I’d seen the Oscar contender 1917 yet.
“Nah. How well did they pull off making it look like a single take?”
She began telling me about how her father fought in World War I and was gassed by the Germans, a subject much heavier than my inquiry concerning Sam Mendes’s directorial choices, so I neglected her statement and retraced my words.
“Did you not notice the single take?”
“Well, I read about it in reviews.”
“You were just saying how you hate the reviews!”
“I know. I guess I didn’t really notice.”
“What’d you think of it?” I asked Fred.
“I took a nap during most of it.”
No longer interested in discussing a movie I knew more about than two people who paid money to see it, I dove into a newfound obsession: making a perfect bowl of oatmeal.
“I made it with peanut butter, jelly, and a banana today. It was delicious!”
“I don’t like peanut butter!” Nana said, catching me by surprise.
“Funny, you’ve never brought that up,” Harry said.
“We used to eat it when I was younger, and it made my mouth so dry.”
“Were you eating it by the gallon? Was there no water in England at the time?” I asked.
Nana finally unleashed her signature laugh at the absurdity of each new topic yielding such inane responses. I disclosed how I had to get home to make a basil zucchini soup. Nana offered me a tip for installing the printer (having already sent me twenty dollars plus a Fandango giftcard when I ordered it, I unselfishly declined), thanked me, and Fred walked us out so he could grab the newspaper.
“See ya Sunday, Addy,” he told me, excited to watch our eighteenth Super Bowl together.
“Bye, Freddie!”
“Okay, you people have a good day!”
Forever unable to properly say goodbye just once, I got in the car while Fred yelled another inaudible farewell with his back to us. Maybe he’d used up his proper goodbyes when individually telling thirty-six lesbians how honored he and Dickie were to lead the pack while he wore what was (secretly) his favorite shirt. At least I had seven months to plan out the tasteful murdercycle (Fred’s preferred term) images I planned on requesting Nana print out along with next season’s picks.