Lenore

This here is my Nan, as you're likely to find her. She doesn't leave the house without her purse. Doesn't leave the room without her purse. You'll see it, constantly, cluched under her knuckles as she makes her way around the world. And once she gets there, she expects a beer. At 87, she's known to show up for family gatherings in black leather pants and lips adorned in hot pink. Always. Sometimes, we have to take her by the elbows and lead her to bed at night. At her age, she still puts the beers away, although, she's slowing down a bit on the drink. She still plays cards five days a week, goes to church twice weekly, gets her hair done every Friday and almost keeps up with our generation of drinkers. I can keep up with none of them anymore.... nor do I attempt.

I call her the Bionic Grandma. She's the first person in her family to live past fifty years old. I'm not sure how much of is has to do with her nerves of steel or how much of it has to do with modern medical technology. She's been widowed since 88. We lost my Pop to lung and liver cancer. It was only when he was diagnosed with severe emphysema that my Nan, reluctantly, gave up smoking cigarettes.

She had a brain annurism at forty, lost a breast from cancer at forty eight, had a stroke at fifty-five and then several heart attacks to follow, including a quadruple by-pass surgery and about a dozen stents (I kid you not) strategically placed throughout her body, holding her arteries open for blood flow. Still, once a week she drives across the bridge to the Arby's drive-through where she orders a half dozen Arbies roast beef sandwhich (with the special sauce) and keeps them in her refridgerator for daily lunches. She does what she wants.

She was almost eighteen when my grandfather first saw her. He came back to town for a homecoming football game and she, Lenore, was a cheerleader. They "courted" (I can only imagine what that means) for a year or two before my pop, Trevor, enlisted for WWII. He got whisked away to England where he helped load children onto trains to get them out of the city. Lenore became very bored without her suitor and so enlisted herself. On their military breaks, they would meet up where they could....France, Italy, Greece... and, upon arriving home, they were married. For those Grateful Dead fans, it was a real, live Reuben & Cherisse.

There have been times in the past summer or two, after an afternoon of margaritas or daquaris, where she'll proceed to tell me (because she knows I'm receptive to such things) that she occasionally wakes in the morning to find Trevor or her mother sitting in the chair beside her bed. She tells me that she knows she's ready to go but every time she makes her peace with it, our family plans one more event.... a graduation, a wedding, a reunion... and then she knows she just has to hold out for that one more thing. Every time I come for a visit and then hug and kiss her goodbye, I wonder if she'll still be there when I come next.

I wonder how many more years she's got of holding out for that one more thing.