At one time my maternal grandfather was a garment cutter. Later he had an auto repair shop. It’s unclear what all happened during the intervening years of carousing and various jobs and one near-fatal shooting, but he wound up in Phoenix, Arizona, where he became — of course — a successful real estate agent. According to my mom’s note, this . . .
For a woman who claimed to dislike drunks, my grandmother sure had a knack for attracting them. Of course she wasn’t responsible for her gallivanting father, Zone. And we have to give her a pass on the very charming first husband, Robert Bruce, who, Granny claimed, squandered so much of her money on booze, she couldn’t even afford to buy . . .
Periodically readers write in to ask if my maternal grandfather really married thirteen times. I never met the man; he died the year before I was born. So all I can say is, that’s what my mother tells me. My grandmother corroborated some of the wilder tales, and told a few of her own, but mostly she didn’t like to . . .
The last time I visited my mother, she had sixteen or seventeen dogs. During my high school years, there were also birds. Hundreds of them. And before she met my father, she kept more than thirty cats in a small apartment. She was encouraged in these animal hoarding tendencies from a young age. Mom was five when my grandmother, who . . .