Life is Precious

Tonight I found out that an old neighbor of mine passed away. He just messaged me in July and I messaged him back letting him know that I would get back to him with more detail later, which I still hadn’t gotten around to. And now he’s gone. And then my thoughts drift, he was storing my strip pole in his garage, I wonder if it’s still there. Then, I wondered, when someone near you passes, is death closer to you? My dog, Jackson, he’s 18. He got really sick recently, but we got through and he’s doing well. But in all this, it made me think of my grandma who is 91 years old, living alone in her apartment.

So I decided to call her tonight. She’s 91 years old. She was born in 1929 in Saipan. Amazing! The 20’s. She’s almost 100 years old. Even though she’s lived in Hawai’i for about 70 years, she still speaks with broken English. My grandma lives alone in an apartment in Honolulu. But my aunties and sister and cousins and all the family go to visit her. She always has someone helping her on a daily basis, which is more than I can say for myself. But as soon as I call, she hangs up on me. So I call back and she lets it go to the answering machine and I leave a message telling her who’s calling. So she picks it up. She was screening my call. She didn’t recognize my number because, “you don’t call enough”. lol! Then, she guilts me by saying I need to come back to visit her or she’s gonna die soon. After telling me that a few times, I finally tell her that she’s guilting me and then she lays it on even more. Then she laughs and I realized, she knows exactly what she’s was doing. All these years I thought she was serious and I know she is to some degree but I had no idea how aware she was of her own sense of humor. Then, she tells me I’m a bad girl for not coming home. And that I need to come back to get married and make a baby. She makes up for both my parents in the guilt department. I tell her should come to visit me and she flat out rejects that idea telling me that she doesn’t like it in mainland America. And I can feel everything that she means. I tell her that she should get a computer or a phone so I can video call her and she says she’s too busy for all that stuff. She has no time. She has all her tv shows and news shows to watch and the cleaning and the cooking. And I think about my life and what little time I have to do everything that I want. Here she is 91 years old without social media or technology except for a television and has no time. Then, she tells me all the gossip with the family. And then we slowly wrap up the call. She jokes, “You better come visit this o-o-o-old lady.” Stuttering. Then she does it again and laughs. She’s really laying on the guilt, trying to talk like an old lady. She tells me that you have to laugh and make jokes. And we milk that joke over and over. “O-o-o-o-ld lady”, etc, etc, etc… It was like talking with one of my comedian friends where we take a line and beat it over the head until it’s exhausted. It was amazing. I knew she was a clown, but I always forget that she must be some sort of genius. Years ago she put on a show and pretended to be drunk in front of all us. I mean, she was brilliant. Then, she tells me she loves me and misses me. And I hang up with a huge smile on my face. We talked for half an hour. Our calls in the past haven’t been more than 5-10 minutes in the past because of the language barrier, but tonight was amazing. We were both alone in our apartments, which was probably the other reason. Usually, when I talk to her my mom is there or someone is with her, so she’s in a rush to get off. But it was one of the funniest, most intimate conversations I had with her. We were able to laugh with each other despite the language barrier. I just wish there wasn’t an ocean barrier between us or I would’ve just jumped in my car and driven over.

It was a good night and I got nothing done, but that’s not true at all.

Life is precious.