(Grandpa refused to stop working at MetLife in Brooklyn, so Mom bought a bunk bed for my room, and from Monday to Friday I took the top and he took the bottom.) I wasn’t there when my grandmother said good-bye to the other Geriatrics of 251st Street, but I’d bet good money that it went something like this: “My youngest, Lucille, fancy she is now! Connecticut, she wants to live?! What do I know from Connecticut?! But she needs me, for the kids! I’m gonna let a stranger, some sfacimm ‘nanny’ or what they call it, watch my grandkids?! My blood! I’d rather be dead! So that’s it, fahn-gool!…good-bye.” Then I imagine a rope ladder dropping down from a hovering helicopter, the blasting propeller winds matting down Tina’s and Anna’s Aqua-Netted helmets of hair, and Grandma hooking an elbow around the lowest rung, lifting into the sky in her threadbare, floral-print, pale orange housedress and dangling terry-cloth slippers, flying up over the clotheslines of eastern Queens, and finally being deposited onto my Aunt Lucille’s manicured front lawn in Westport, Connecticut, right in between the gobsmacked landscaper holding on to his leaf blower for dear life and the petrified neighbor with a popped-collar polo and pearls who had just come over to deliver a batch of welcome-to-the-neighborhood scones.
What do You think about The Clancys Of Queens (2016)?
