One of the abiding memories of my childhood concerns my grandmother, and a very specific method of mischief that I would mete out to her on a regular basis.
Gran had cupboards stacked high with tinned food - everything from peaches to salmon to dog meat, all arrayed in neat piles in a cupboard close to ground level, where little hands plotting no end of misery could do their worst.
I would delightedly strip the labels from every tin I could reach, condemning the poor woman to a meal of custard with luncheon meat, or cherries in gravy.
'Do you realise what you did to me on Tuesday, love? Fruit cocktail, and the jelly that lines the inside of pork pies! Think of your poor old gran having to eat that!' Such revelations caused me to begin to cry - but with laughter.
Not once do I recall ever being admonished as I indulged her taste for combining food in unusual ways. I was instead confronted with a calm tolerance derived from a love which endures.
It was some 24 or 25 years ago when I discovered how fascinating a pastime it was to rob tinned food of its identity. My grandmother is still around, aged 87, and on her better days reminds me of the incidents I describe above.
I wish she could have more better days. My dominant emotion when I see her is: "If one person I can think of didn't deserve to be thus reduced, it is you."
On the occasions she recognises me (they correlate significantly with the occasions when she correctly takes the rainbow of prescribed pills) I keep the conversation light - you have no idea, gran, how upset I was when the cat woke me up at 5am the other morning, demanding breakfast! I oughtta make a pair of gloves out of him! Do you want to go racing down the corridor in your wheelchair? I can give you a push if you like, and see where you end up? She laughs, and the lady of 20 or more years ago is momentarily recovered.
You truly didn't deserve to be thus reduced. I can't even find the words - 'reduced' makes you sound like you're somehow a non-person - it's as flattering as the term 'invalid.' Another way of looking at it is that you are not reduced, but shifted - the world I inhabit is one you have grown tired of, and I can only expect you to return some of the time, and only on your terms.
The places you spend most of your time are alien and inacessible to me, but you can and do report back. You went to church four times on the same day last week, and also to the market, without so much as leaving your room. The church, apparently, was bloody awful, and you aren't going back there any time soon.
Nobody can invalidate the truth and complexity of those experiences. They are not the offspring of age, or illness - they are real, and we treat them as such. Tell me about the market? Was it busy? Did you buy anything nice? So it proceeds - broken pieces of experience rain down, and I listen intently. What a lousy church! You're probably better going to the one down the street next time....
