Pretty much all of my family knows I’m gay, but we decided that it was best not to let the 90+ year-old demographic know. It’s not like they couldn’t handle it (they survived a World War and the Gaucho pants fashion trend), but it was just one of those things that we decided not to burden the grandmas with.
This past Thanksgiving, I brought my boyfriend, Esteban, to the family dinner. We’d only been dating about 6 months, so it honestly was more of a “don’t be alone on Thanksgiving, come to my family’s place” rather than like “here is my boyfriend – I’m out, I’m Proud GET USED TO IT” campaign.
My step-grandmother is… not a subtle woman, so when introduced to Esteban she immediately yelled “Well, ya don’t look Mexican!” You may think she was targeting my boyfriend unfairly but she was insulting everyone with varying frequency throughout the day.
To my niece: “I can’t understand you. You talk like baby.”
To my sister-in-law: “How much do you weigh?”
The shadiest of all shades to my mother (who recently had her knees operated on): “Well, you know I still feel pretty good. I’ve got both of my real knees, see.”
Grandma also had a long discourse on her trip to Paris. I’d probably describe her one-sided monologue as more of a freight train than a conversation as for almost twenty minutes she would interrupt anything people said with a blasé description of the city of lights.
“But next weekend Tom is going to be coming into town so -”
“PARIS. They have all them lights. They like twinkle. You wouldn’t believe it. Paris.”
Everyone nods.
“-But, yeah, so we have to be sure we have everything ready for when he –”
“And they got that big TOWER that looks funny but it lights up real nice. PARIS.”
Awkward silence.
“-So what I think-”
“PARIS.”
During the entire dinner and evening Esteban and I acted like we were afraid of each other to keep family members from being uncomfortable. Grandma surprisingly had very few questions for BF despite his being from a foreign country. To be honest I was pretty shocked as one family member and I had this interaction:
“How is he here?”
“He works here. He’s got a year-long work visa.”
“Oh! A visa!”
Very clearly the tacit assumption here was that it was a miracle a Mexican had made it into the country without jumping a fence or being a drug mule.
I was really pleasantly surprised that Grandma kept her questioning to a minimum and basically stuck to her favorite conversation thread of PARIS for the entire day. Her being 93-years-old and from a different generation, I really didn’t think she’d put all of it together, especially as Esteban and I basically acted like the other had leprosy during the entire visit.
But one should never underestimate the wisdom of elders.
The next time I was home for a family event my sister-in-law plopped down next to me and goes.
“Grandma figured it out.”
My mouth literally fell open. My sister-in-law then proceeded to tell me that my other sister-in-law had received a call after my visit home and it went something like this.
“Tedd brought a friend. Some man.”
“Oh.”
“I hope he’s not living with him but he has that fresh haircut.”
That was it. A haircut was the key to my step-grandmother discovering my sexuality. It wasn’t the years of never bringing a date home, my refusal to talk about women I’m dating, or my feminine manners. Nope. It was the fact that I brought home a guy with a “fresh haircut.”
The string of connections made in her mind can only be imagined. The worldliness of her assumption is clearly the mark of someone who has spent a great deal of time in PARIS.
An Awkward Segue
A while ago I went on a Segway tour with Esteban. It was raining the morning we were supposed to go, so they actually pushed back our tour about 2 hours. When we found this out, one couple, two doctors, said they weren’t going to anymore. Upon hearing this the only other woman on the tour goes:
“Doctors, huh? I’m a mortician! I guess when they’re done with you they come to me.”
The doctors didn’t find this amusing. Neither did Esteban and I; we promptly scuttled off to the nearest diner for breakfast. We found the idea of a mortician cackling at her own jokes to be an unsettling scene.
Somehow the woman ended up at the same restaurant as us. We didn’t notice until she chased us out of the diner.
“You like the food?”
“It was good,” I said.
“I didn’t like the eggs,” she said. “My father is a chicken farmer and I’m very sensitive about my eggs.”
I don’t know how one responds to that anecdote, I didn’t in the moment either, so we just kept walking toward the start of the tour. The woman took our silence as a sign to continue talking to us, so we heard some more stories about her travel and her mortician life. To be honest, I didn’t really listen much, trying to act normal but feeling exceedingly uncomfortable. She seemed like a nice lady, but there was something about her that was just… unsettling.
500 stories about chicken farms and mortician travels later it was time to start the tour. At the beginning of the Segway tours they take almost 30 mins to get you adjusted to the vehicle. As part of this training the instructor says very clear things like:
“Don’t drive next to that cliff that falls over into the river.”
Mortician, I guess feeling comfortable with death since it was her vocation, immediately routed herself for a joy ride along the stairs that led down into the river.
“Geez!” The tour guide yelled. “Get back here! You’ll fall!”
“Oh! Sorry!” she said nonplussed. Subtext: I am the master of death! Try to keep me from the edge! *cackle*
The tour guide lets you kind of practice roving around in a small area while he makes final preparations. With the extra time and, being boys, Esteban and I started trying to make the Segways go in reverse. Mortician saw this and thought it was definitely the cool thing to do, so she started to try it out, too.
It was literally 10 secs from her starting to try the reverse trick that we heard a crash.
Now, before you judge our reactions, just know that Segways actually don’t stop moving when you hop off, they keep going forward. Also, realize that the below was the actual scene before you judge us for actually turning away from the scene to stifle laughter.
The Mortician had somehow fallen so that she was under the Segway. She was waving to us and saying “Oh, I’m fine!” but as she was waving and talking, realize that, as mentioned before, the Segways don’t stop moving, so literally the handles of the Segway were very lightly, repetitively crashing into her head.
So Esteban and I were staring at a wild-eyed, bushy-haired woman, smiling and waving as a 200 lb scooter was basically saying to her “Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!”
Before I turned to start laughing I did yell “Help?” (question mark inflection included).
The guide jumped about a foot in the air and ran over to Mortician, lifting off the Segway. She stood up smiling UNTIL she saw a trickle of blood on her hand (it wasn’t a very big trickle).
That was the end of her smiles and her tour. Scuttling off, it wasn’t more than 2 mins from the sight of blood that she was sprinting away screaming “I’m headed to Walgreen’s.”
The guide summarized the scene best as she shuffled across Wacker Drive traffic when he said, “Welp, that was weird.”