Tall tales of a big fish...

You ever notice how when we age, the stories of our lives before "the golden years" become our only conversation starter? Or how those stories become grander and grander every time we tell them? Well, that's how it is with my great-grandmother, at least. She started off with the usual: Telling us how she left home when she was eighteen, how she met my great-grandfather, how they got married and had kids, and even stories of how her own kids used to sneak out of the house in the middle of the night, and so on and so forth. This was okay, especially the first few times she told these stories. After a while it got a little annoying because it was the same story over and over, but we put up with it because at least she was remembering everything how it really was still. But now I think she's caught on to our boredom, or maybe she just gets her Love Inspired romance novels mixed up with her own life, but whatever it is, her stories are getting more and more dramatic, and impossibly, confusingly, even annoying intricate. My dad has touched on this before in his own blog, "Harlequin is rotting her brain!", but since then it has gotten worse. Now not only does she tell us stories of our own lives, using false information and inner monologue that even we have never told her, and talking in the third person when referring to herself ("she said", "then she thought"), but she also makes stories up in the middle of the night. For instance, a regular favorite of hers is calling in the middle of the night (by "calling", I mean ringing the little plug-in doorbell that we gave her to get in touch with us in case of emergency) just to tell us that she heard voices outside her window. Now, this may not sound very strange, because really, what's so weird about hearing someone talking outside your window in the middle of the night? But you have to put yourself in our situation to really understand:
First, we currently have no neighbors next door to us, so there is no way she could be hearing them.
Second, this is in the middle of the night, at anywhere between 2:30 to 6:00 o'clock in the friggin' butt crack of not-even-dawn-yet! Who's outside at that time? I mean, yeah, any time after five is probably people going to work, and sometimes even earlier than that, but who's going to go to our grandmother's window just to talk? And it can't be a robber or anything, because no one around here is stupid enough to break into a house of five, in a culdesac, in the city of Lakewood where if we call the sheriff, they actually show up. Plus this house is infamous for having loaded guns in it (my great-grandfather had a small collection).
And third (and this is the best one), she's deaf. At least she's been saying so since bloody forever. So how could she even hear voices outside her window, anyway? And it gets even better: She sleeps on her "good" ear, so if she really can't hear out of one, and that's the only exposed one, how could she possibly bloody-hell hear ANYTHING?!?

Anyway, now that you understand, let's get back to the people talking outside her window...This particular made-up story comes in several different variations, from two men saying aloud how they plan on climbing through our impossible-to-get-into-from-the-outside attic to steal from us, to a loudspeaker saying something like, "you need to evacuate your homes immediately" or "don't drink the water" and so on and so forth. Hell, just the night before last she said that there was something going on on the corner of two streets that you can't even see from where we live, and she wanted me to peek out the window to see what it was. Say what? Yeah, I would have had to get in the car, and drive over to these streets to see what (if anything) was going on. But she insisted, so I went into my room, pretended to check, and went back and told her that all was quiet, and nothing that I could see was going on. So then when I ask her where she heard that something was going on on (there I go with the double "on" again...) so-and-so street, she pointed to (get this) her clock, saying, "that told me" in a matter-of-fact manner. And yeah, okay, her clock does talk, but only when she presses the button on top, and even then it's a prerecorded "IT'S TWO, FIFTY FIVE, PM" (or whatever time it is when she presses it) in a robotic woman's voice. So I told her that. I told her that that was her clock, and that it told only the time, and that was it. She started to argue, so then I just said "okay" and went back to bed.

You getting the gist of it yet? Just wait, it gets even worse...

Some of her latest middle of the friggin' I-should-be-asleep-right-now night calls are some of the best. Like one night (at least a month ago now, I think) she called us and asked upon our arrival, "What's in my water besides water?"
*cue confused looks on our faces*
We told her that there was nothing in her water besides water, as far as we knew, but she was convinced that her water was poisoned or something, and said that it went "this way, and that way" in her glass. Are you confused? Well, I wish I could explain what she meant by that, but unfortunately, I can't explain something that even I don't understand. I mean, she seriously thought that some boogieman had sneaked his way into her room and poisoned her water. And we even asked her "who do you think would poison you?" after she started saying stuff like, "well, I've got no reason to fear death" and stuff, and she just danced around the subject, until we finally threatened to take her to the hospital to get her stomach pumped, and she quickly said that it was no big deal, that she didn't do anything to deserve to die, and that she would be fine. The next day of course we teased the crud out of her for this (our relationship with her is like that. We all, including her, have the ability to tease each other without anyone getting mad. At least most of the time), by putting green food coloring in her water, and handing it to her. She of course laughed, once she got the reference.
But I think that the one weird middle-of-the-night-call that can beat all others is one that I personally had about two to three weeks ago, though.
It started out the same as usual: Nana rang, I stumbled out of bed and bounced off the walls till I made it into her room, and I asked what was the matter. She starts the weirdness right off by asking if we had any purple cans ("maybe some soda?" she said) in the house. The only thing that was running through my sleep-muddled mind right then was, "why does she want a grape soda in the middle of the night?"
Instead I just said "not that I know of", and then asked why. She replies by saying (and I quote), "Well just don't drink out of the purple can, or you'll die."
At this point I know she has got to be dreaming, and I'm too tired to either tell her that or ask her where on earth she got this vital information, so I just said "okay" and went back to bed. Of course, once I sat in bed for a while, trying to get back to sleep, I got to thinking: Where in the hell did she get such strange information from? That and as soon as I was out of earshot from her I burst into laughter, knowing that I wouldn't be the only one to do so the next morning, when I told the rest of the family what strange thing she came up with that night, and how my story beat all of theirs. In fact, the first thing I said to my mom as a morning greeting, was, "don't drink out of the purple can, or you'll die."
And of course after the initial "huh?" and my explanation of what had happened the night before, she and my dad and bro all laughed just as I had. And when she got up, I surprised her with none-other-than a Pepsi can, with a piece of purple construction paper taped tastefully to it. At first she sort of had this horrified look on her face, like "oh my God! She's trying to kill me!!!", but then she seemed to get that I was teasing her, and she laughed with me.

So where does this strange behavior in our elders come from? Is it just because they get bored and decide to make crap up? Is it because they saw something on TV, or read something in a book, and they're just mixing it up with reality? Or is it perhaps their own strange dreams leeching into not only their subconscious thoughts (the place from which dreams are said to originate from), but also their conscious ones (when they're supposedly awake)? I don't think I'll ever really know, at least in my lifetime. Maybe sometime in the next fifty years or more we'll come up with a device that can literally read our conscious and subconscious thoughts like an open book. Hell, now that I think about it, it'll probably be sooner than that, because they do have a machine that can create images of our thoughts, like a blurry, poor quality movie (at least according to House). And once we can read other's thoughts, we'll finally know why we'll die if we drink out of the purple can...
Blog ya later, Miss Eccentric.