Lately, I’m mostly interested in hanging out with old people.
To contrast: I talked with Hunter, my ex-boyfriend, now best-platonic-friend last night on the phone, about his weekend up in Madison. Ah-! he told me. The sun's been shining, it’s finally warm, and everyone’s coming out of hibernation. Spontaneous parties start up left and right at friends’ houses all around town and the Coup played a free show on this esplanade at the university. It was a giant lovefest and suddenly he has some magnetic Lady Attractor Beam going on too, because women are flirting with him left and right and yes, summer is starting out allllright.

I laughed, because I also had a great weekend, but I spent the whole thing with senior citizens. I’ve been visiting my grandma in her small town a lot lately, and drove there again, this weekend. Nona is 91 and lives by herself, still, in the house where my mom lived out her teenage years. Also, as I’ve told you before, she’s my favorite person on the planet.
Now that she’s just a few hours away, I find it hard to resist the urge to spend quiet weekends sitting with her on her screened-in porch, watching cardinals and bluejays and drinking coffee or pink wine and cackling together.

A few weeks ago, my grandmother had a fall going out to her garden. It was really scary at first, because we didn’t know if the cause was a stroke or what she’d broken, or anything. Turns out that there was no stroke and that she didn’t break anything, just bruised her pelvis badly. But I did spend that weekend at the hospital. I’ve always thought of hospitals as places where all your needs are met, and although this one wasn’t too bad, I did find out that you actually have to speak up just to get basic things: a napkin and a straw for your grandma who can’t bend her spine enough to sit up and eat the soup they’ve tossed unceremoniously on the tray beside the door; an extra blanket because her bed’s right beside the vent.

Nona’s better now. She’s still using a walker, which she hates and refuses to go out into public with, for fear of “looking like an old lady,” nor can she get very far before becoming too achy. But this weekend, a neighbor came and picked the both of us up on a golf cart (how do people get these things? At what point in your life does a golf cart become a normal item that you decide to purchase and have to keep in your own home?) and we went to a pig picking at a neighbor’s across the street.

It was huge. The back yard itself, the set-up, and the massive group of people who came to eat the crazy-delicious pork right off this gigantic smoker, along with hush puppies, broccoli slaw, boiled potatoes, and my favorite thing in the world for dessert, banana pudding.

What always startles me in Grifton, my grandma’s town, is to see the number of young married people and their kids. This idea that there’d be a new generation at all. What startles me even more is to meet people who don’t know my grandmother and therefore worship her as the undisputed queen of town. Actually, I’ve never met anyone there who doesn’t know who she is. But I never trust anyone who lacks what I deem to be the requisite affection for her.

All in all, I’m much more comfortable hanging out with senior citizens in Grifton. Part of this is that the cultural difference between the elderly people and me feels, for some reason, much less pronounced than the yawning divide that I feel between me and the New Country Pop-Rock listenin’, SUV-drivin’ “Yee-haw!” yellin’ young folks.

All of whom seem like interlopers to me. In my mind, I’ve realized, I’ve turned Grifton into this town defined by and equated to my grandma’s generation. There is some suburban sprawl going on outside the town’s old center, but that’s not the part that I consider even to be Grifton, really. I think of its short stretch of downtown, the mostly sad, empty storefronts—one of them once belonging to a store owned by my grandfather. I think of the railroad tracks crossing through the center of town, the old depot that used to be the center of the town’s operations and now is just sort of quaint. (That curse.)

I love to sit with the elderly people and hear about family histories and scandals and how things used to be when my mother’s family had relatives on every block. Because a selfish part of me thinks of Grifton as somehow belonging to my family. I imagine that once we finally have no immediate tie left there, the place will be swept up from the Earth. Going back there in some period after my grandmother, would be like visiting your childhood home after some new people have bought it and made it theirs. The smell in the air, the roads you take to get to Grifton, all of it feels like, to some degree, it belongs to me.

And so I sat at the pig picking with the elderly people at a group of tables set up on a small rise, while the young families ran around at a faster pace down below. There were two guys of indeterminate age, somewhere between 25 and 35, both of whom I chatted and joked with in line while fixing plates for Nona and me. Both came up separately a number of times, to get Coke from the table where I sat with my grandma’s friends, but I didn’t really engage them again. I was too engrossed in listening to what this childhood friend of my mother’s had to say about a teacher they both had.

There are a lot of end-of-year-blowout, alcohol-fueled get-togethers going on here in Beachtown, too, with the school year winding down and a number of people getting ready to move. But somehow, I can’t work up the enthusiasm to participate in all that, either. Right now I prefer the porch, the birds, and more than anything else, Nona’s face as she bursts into laughter.