Grandma and Christian

     This entry is entirely rushed.  I hate to miss a deadline (Friday is my day to blog!), but, this week, I've hated even more to tear myself away from the miserably written pages of Fifty Shades of Grey, which I've had to balance with out-of-town baseball games, swimming lessons, and physical therapy.  (Confession:  I finished it today and immediately downloaded book two.)  It's disgusting.  It's miserably written.  It should be a drinking game with all the "inner goddess," "shades," "flogger."  And it reminds me of my Grandma.

     My grandmother passed away in mid-February, and I'm nowhere near over her loss.  The clinic I was in yesterday had CMT on the television.  Grandma always watched country music videos on CMT, and sometimes she muted it ... which is pretty hilarious.  (Go on.  Think it over.)  The last program we watched together was a biography on Lady Antebellum, and I still crumble when one of their songs comes on the radio.  My three-year-old still asks if we can go see Grandma in Room 5 whenever we pass the hospital.  I miss that woman so much.  

     Grandma was strict in a way that grandmothers should be.  She never gave away the mysteries of her childhood, and she acted as though she'd never sinned.  (We know better, but those are stories for another day.)  Grandma's sole vice was her "romance" novels.  When I was young, I ran my finger down the spines of her vast collection of Harlequins, not knowing what they were.  In recent years, I spotted novels with racy names  and covers with shirtless men on her Kindle.  It was an unspoken rule that we weren't weren't allowed to talk about it, but, clearly, Grandma preferred smut to literature.  I love that about her.

     Grey isn't my kind of book.  I prefer comedy and memoir.  We never really talked books, Grandma and I, even though we were both avid readers.  I wish she was still here.  I want to know if we'd talk about Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele, or if we'd both even admit to reading it.  Her birthday is in August, and I would've loved to gift her with the trilogy and a secret smile.  I'd like to hear her admonish me for buying such a gift and then hug me tightly, patting my back as she did so.  

     I miss her.

     

     (And that's the end, because I'm crying.  Damnit.)