Interlude

My Great Grandma Coia was always up to something. One overcast Sunday morning she was walking to church in her hometown of Bloomington, Indiana. She had on a freshly ironed, red print dress, her best shoes, and a red hat. She was using an umbrella as a walking stick. As a devout Catholic, Grandma Coia rarely missed Mass. My parents were accompanying her as guests at her church that day so they walked with her and witnessed what happened.

The elastic broke on Grandma's bloomers and they fell down around her ankles. Grandma immediately kicked the bloomers high into the air, opened her umbrella, and caught the flying pants. She clicked the umbrella shut and kept right on walking.

Interlude

More on Grandma Coia. She was a short, dark-haired, black-eyed Italian woman with a hooked Roman nose. I barely knew her as she died when I was five years old, but I recall that nose and her shrieking foreign voice calling to me, "Come-a to Grrrandma Coia!" I would run and hide. I thought she was a witch. Too bad I wasn't older and could have gotten truly to know her.

In 1951 she was living with her son Victor and his wife Myrtle, my grandparents. They decided they'd had enough of Grandma in the same house with them. I can't say I blame them. Who wants your mother/mother in law right there in the house all the time? In 1952 my grandparents remodeled their house, giving Grandma quarters next door to them in a newly created apartment. My folks visited Grandma just after she had been given her own place next door. You'd think they'd sent her to Siberia. Grandma was crying. "My son and Myrtle, they-a throw me out of their house," she sniffed. "They-a send me away over here." She wiped her eyes. Just then the upstairs toilet flushed next door. Grandma burst into a fresh flood of tears and wailed, "And they even shit on my head!"