andamu

Have I told you yet about my grandmother? She has always been considered the frail one because of her many and varied health problems. It seems ironic that she outlived not only all my other grandparents, but also both my parents.

She used to give us wonderful candy treats when we were little whenever they visited, and she drinks a cup of tea about every 30 minutes. She has a number of quirks that have entered family legend, and is still hanging on at almost 84.

Her favorite interjection is not "That's amazing," "Can you believe it?" or "Oh my goodness." Hers is something which reveals her nature in ways that she never realized: "Kan jy dit oorvertel?" which roughly translated says "Can you repeat that to someone?"

For granny is Gossip Central; she seldom indulges in it by malice or spite, rather it is with an almost childish sense of wonder, and the relish of the news bearer. And she and Angel Face last about equally long before they blab a secret - in other words, about 45 seconds.

After my father died, my mother moved us to the town where my grandparents lived, which is also the town where all three her siblings and their families were. (Mainly coincidence, this was not the town where they grew up - there had been no previous ties to the place.)

And growing up there, the painful last three years of high school, we knew that once my granny came to know something about us, the entire family would know it within an hour, and most of her circle of friends before the end of the next.

After a while, we also figured out how to use this to our advantage. If you wanted to say something to someone on a tender subject, no need to scrape together your courage - just tell granny and they would know soon enough. If you wanted to show off an accomplishment, again no need to go around bragging about it - just let granny "discover it by accident" and everyone would know that you got the highest grades or made the team or got admission or whatever.

These days she is truly frail, and instead of wandering around gathering stray bits to pass on, she now has to rely on the world to come to her room. But still, whenever I call her from halfway around the world, she bubbles over with random pieces of gossip about family and mutual acquaintances, and she goes about mining information about our lives in a skilled manner, storing away tidbits for later dissemination.