Storytime

In eighth grade, my friend Hammad Ahmed was given an English assignment requiring him to give an interview with one of his grandparents. Unfortunately, Hammad's only living grandparents lived in Pakistan and spoke only Pakistani, which Hammad wasn't really familiar with. So he asked me to help him make up a grandparent. I created this woman, a widow, who was incontented with simply lazing around the house all day like other old folks. She spent her spring and summers in France, living at a Loire vineyard with winemaster Claude. Her and Claude had been lovers for ten years, but they refused to get married because neither wished to leave their respective countries, so all they had was their half-year together. In the fall and winter, Hammad's grandmother lived in a large Victorian house in Maryland which she rented out to other elderly people, and she held great poker-- never bridge-- competitions within the house to lighten the spirits of the old people in their twilight years. On Sundays, her niece, Anne, would come visit her for a day, and they'd sit by the fire drinking Claude's wine and talking of far-away places. She was rich, of course, from her late husband's books, and had the money hidden beneath the house. Occasionally, as Hammad would eventually say to his class in his presentation, she would suddenly feel the need to just up and leave, for England, for China, for New Zealand... nobody really knew where, because she would go without leaving any kind of notice for the family.

After Hammad presented his fake interview, his teacher approached him and told him how much she wanted to meet Hammad's grandmother. "I just think her life is the most interesting I've ever heard of."