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My maternal grandmother is at or around 90 and quite spry.  She deftly dodged my attempts at pictures and was able to mock my dad for having dropped a large jar of pickles.  She told a few stories about what was going on in her care facility but at one point said she still refused to have spaghetti and meatballs.

Me: Why no spaghetti?
Her: Terry, you need to understand my first encounter with the stuff.
Me: Ok, what was it.
Her: I had just gotten off the boat from Ireland and there was this man eating something out of a can.  He put his spoon it, and it came out with strings on it and a ball of meat.  He looked at me and asked “would you like some?  It’s spaghetti and it’s good” and the strings were stuck to his face and he had a wild look to him.   I think he was a Scot.  And since then, I swore I would never be like that man.

At least she has her principles.

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My brother has made a coordinated effort to maintain contact with our maternal grandmother who lives outside of Atlantic City, NJ.  After 50 years she still has a strong brogue and never got her citizenship which puts her at odds with some diminutive Sicilian in her apartment complex that keeps threatening to submit her to ICE, apparently not realizing that there is a large space between citizen and illegal alien and his miss of this is rendered even more farcical by the fact that he himself is not native born.

Regardless, Ryan has done admirably in keeping her up to date in the goings of our lives and even does a passable impression of a late octogenarian Irish expat when relating stories and once I found particularly moving.  When my parents were getting married, she questioned the wisdom of my Catholic mother marrying a generic Protestant as she still describes such non-specific members of the Jesus Brigade the cause of the The Troubles that had occurred from her birth to the time of her emigration.  This dislike had apparently worn away over the decades as my brother mentioned that he was now a Methodist to which she simply responded with an emphatic and genuine “Good for you”.  There’s also the non-trivial likelihood that she’s not familiar with Methodism, but I’ll take my chances.