Peggy’s prompt—you give up the trying

Grandma Jane Camp—an enigma wrapped within an opaque shower curtain. I remember the first time I met her. I, already married to her son, went to give her a hug and she literally disappeared inside my arms. She shrank and shrank until I gave up trying. And that’s what she was like always.

She seemed real enough on the surface. She had a big floppy body and old lady curly white hair and glasses and a loud voice and she constantly talked. So she seemed real enough until you began to squeeze or to ask questions and then she just sort of disappeared. She’d go from a blowsy loudmouth to “oh, I just don’t know; it was hard,” and then her voice would peter out and you’d have to wait a few seconds until she got internally charged again and off she’d go onto another tale about her morphine-addicted mother, or how she told a dirty joke to her doctor, or how she and the taxi driver who’s been taking her to her hair appointment for years are good friends and he would do anything for her and, why, his own mother said that he, the taxi driver, treated her, Jane, better than he treated his own mother. And on and on she’d go, hardly taking a breath, until you’d say, “Your mother was addicted to morphine?” And the air would go out of her and she’d say, “Well, you just don’t know; it was hard.”