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What Our Grandmothers Knew About Men That We Forgot
How the matriarch changed between the front porch and the podcast.
Florence, Arizona. Sometime in the late 1990s
Two old ladies, Rosemary and Dorothy, sit on a couple lawn chairs on the back porch of a small stucco house near the edge of town. There’s a small glass topped table between them with two ice cold Coors Banquets and a pack of cigarettes Rosemary just grabbed from the freezer.
Dorothy is a widow, old Arizona Anglo, I think. She wore capri pants, still listened to Frank Sinatra, and knew everyone in town.
Rosemary has been her best friend for forty years. Irish Catholic, and kept a bottle of Jameson Whiskey under the kitchen sink next to the dish soap, separate from the rest of the booze in the liquor cabinet. Why, I have no idea, but she probably had a reason. Rosemary had that Irish storyteller gene in her, which she passed on to her granddaughter Jonatha, who is sprawled out on a sunworn lounge chair a few feet away.
A police scanner is on inside the kitchen, audible through the screen door. It has been on since just after dinner. Codes and dispatch and units responding. No one is listening, just catching what matters.
The conversation isn’t a single topic. Names of people in town come and go. A car passes on the street and grandma or Dorothy may know whose it is. Dorothy saw something at the IGA on Tuesday…
