My Grandmother is 90!

I'm in Anderson, Indiana. It's a former factory town for General Motors, and like many former factory towns it has been slowly dying for nearly 25 years. The tool and die lines where my grandfather and grandmother and uncle and even my father worked have shuttered and are currently being razed. And each time I visit, more and more store fronts in Anderson are empty and have a For Sale sign out front.

My grandmother has lived in this town for 65 years. And yet she still considers herself from Tennessee. She still gets the local paper from "down home," and moved with all her Tennessee friends to Anderson in 1940, essentially creating little Overton County, TN (population 3,000) in Indiana.

On the 25th of this month she turns 90. My aunt threw a huge party for her at the local bowling alley on Sunday. Over 100 people showed up ... folks she had worked with in the factory that she hadn't seen in 40 years, a huge Tennessee contingency, the neighbors.



My grandmother has always been sickly. She is constantly complaining that her body aches, her bowels don't move, her head hurts, her arthritis makes her knuckles swell. She, like everyone else in my family, suffers from depression. Yet she is the one who has outlived many of her siblings, her son, her husband, most of her friends. And the only real decline I can see in her after all these years is that she's more frail and she is decidedly going deaf. She's really quite healthy as she still lives alone, still does her own laundry, still fixes her own meals.

I turned up at the party after having not slept for 40 hours due to flight connections from Tel Aviv, to see my grandma parading around wearing a cape and tiara and holding a scepter, and complaining (lightly, of course) that we should have waited until she turned 100 to have this party.

Don't worry, I thought, we'll probably be having a party for you when you turn 120. Because I honestly believe my grandmother will outlive us all.