Searching for my homeless grandma

My local Key Food doubles as a self-service recycling center. It is a reverse vending machines; enter your bottles and cans and out comes shiny coins. In turn, it also serves as a community water cooler for the enterprising homeless, green-minded citizens, and old Chinese grandmas. It’s obvious why the first grouping frequents this area. Of course there’s the money and those huge plastic bags are cumbersome when navigating between car doors on the subway. Additionally, they need to make room in the cart for others things…anything…everything. The second category utilizes this facility to ease their wasteful urban guilt. I know when I put my recyclables outside someone else has left a lid on, placed in the green bin, or not adhered to the NYC Recycles website motto “When in doubt, leave it out,” which will cause the recycling machine in the plant to throw a screw, explode, causing a green Chernobyl now turning my recyclables into trash. But in my mind, I have just set a baby humpback whale free. As for the old Chinese clan, you may think there reasoning is not too dissimilar from the homeless collectors. But I believe they do it for the sheer joy of sticking their heads into trash bins and the fulfillment from a hard days work of dumpster diving. You know these grannies have money squirreled away in the First Chinese Bank whose main branch is located under their mattress. Regardless they live in Chinatown in a 15 floor walk up tenement building that they have lived in since the Chinese Exclusion Act so their rent is 50 dollars anyway.

Every time I pass one of these tiny smiling grannies loaded down with their wares on the street, I think of my grandma and give them a huge smile. I want to ask them in my broken Chinese if they need any help. They, in return, pay me no attention. I have an affinity for the elderly like most people have towards small children. They share the same innocence and helpless quality, granted one is based on a puerile naiveté and the other on dementia and frailty, but both are endearing none the less. In the end, with children, I am left with Twinkie in my hair and the feeling that this imagination and trust was squashed in utero for me. With the elderly you are left with a certain hazy wisdom gained from years of knowledge and Twinkie in your hair.

When I first docked ship here I saw a posting to help elderly Chinatown residents learn how to use email. This was perfect since I was determined to adopt a surrogate grandma. I did not take the volunteer position since I learned Chinese from my grandma it is probably the equivalent of Old English. My vocabulary consists of food words and not much else. Unlike romance languages, Chinese is tonal. Therefore the pidgin form cannot not be determined by simply adding a vowel at the end, such as car’o’ in Mexican. I don’t think yelling com-PU-ter and mou-SEY would clarify anything for them. I am still on the look out for that special bra-selling, bored grandma to take me in.

My grandma recently turned 97 years old. Therefore she is no longer the robust 80 year- old I remember growing up. Around age 90, she abandoned all of her previous grandmotherly duties. Her favorite activity became going to Luby’s and ordering the chicken or going to Cracker Barrel and ordering the chicken or going to Fujita and ordering the chicken. She now uses every geriatric attachment on the market to aid her in her travels to said restaurants and the grocery store. We just throw them all in the trunk and let her choose her weapon of choice. The most successful arrangement we have found is the wheelchair-cane combination. I would wheel her through the aisles and she would knock down any item she desired like we were on the geriatric version of Supermarket Sweep. It was chaos and the most irritating 45 minutes of my life, but she was entertained, so it works. Since it now takes my grandma 30 minutes to walk down the hall to the bathroom I don’t she will be able to visit and my dreams of wandering the streets together rummaging through my neighbors trash have been dashed.