Today is my grandmother's 95th

Today is my grandmother's 95th Birthday. She is an old, old lady. She is also one of the most wonderful, generous, kind-hearted, and genuinely nice people that I have ever known. On Saturday we threw her a 95th birthday party that brought in about 75 people and rocked her assisted living facility from 2 to 6pm. Among the attendees was Richard Dwarsky, who is the piano player for the Prarie Home Companion (you hear Garison Keilor mention him every episode). He actually skipped out on that to attend my grandma's party - "a higher calling," he called it. He played a lot of music that day. It was great.

Most of my two weeks in Minnesota were spent either preparing for or thinking about preparing for that party. I was getting together a suprise present for Nana - the present to end all 95th birthday presents: her autobiography. A couple of summers ago I had interviewed her, and got 3 hours of really great stories and memories on tape. Since then I have slowly been transcribing them into written form, and more recently I got the idea to start editing them into a short book, entitled: "A Long and Interesting Life: The Autobiography of Mary Jo Garlich."

It turned out really, really well. It was suprisingly time-consuming, though, to go from spoken word to a fully formatted document in book form, with chapters, and pages that line up consecutively when you fold it right, and everything. I got my cousin Jake, a graphic design artist, to do the cover, and my brother and sister and he all helped me put it together (at the last minute of course), so it ended up being a gift from all of her grandchildren. We presented it to her at the party and read some of it aloud - i think it went over really well. She was really touched, and even though we made 40 copies, it didn't quite meet the demand.

Funny story, though. My dad had planned to read aloud this really cute, touching story of how Nana met my grandpa Al: she was at a dance and after she met him she said, "If I had a name like Garlich, I change it!" Its one of those nice family heirloom type stories that gets told a lot. But my dad unwittingly started reading the chapter before it, a chapter detailing my grandmother's unfortunate engagement to a couple of slimy guys who cheated on her and got other girls pregnant. Not exactly 95th birthday party material. Especially following the particularly wholesome excerpt that I read, which described her as a young girl growing up on the prarie, learning to ride horses and helping out on the farm. Oh well. It went over pretty well, nonetheless.

That was definitely one of the highlights of my trip home. Overall I had a great time spending time with my family, and catching up with some old high school friends that i haven't seen for years. One of the less jubilant aspects of the trip was that my stepdad Bud was in and out of the hospital with pretty significant heart disease. When I got into town we went straight from the airport to the hospital, where he was preparing for a coronary bypass operation. And considering that he was just finishing up chemotherapy for a lymphoma, that one of the chemo drugs damaged his heart muscle in addition to making him very immunosuppressed, and the fact that he ended up needing a whopping 5 grafts (that's a quintuple bypass - I didn't even know they went up that high), his recovery has been pretty miraculous. He was out of the hospital in record time, has exceeded all of the recovery landmarks, and has been feeling really well. We were all so relieved about that.

Unfortunately, an hour before I left, we got a call to tell us that another close relative, my step sister's father-in-law Chuck, was in the hospital with a possible heart attack. Bud thinks he was trying to steal his thunder. So here's my message to America (and especially to my dad): eat less meat, eat less fat, get more exercise, and take care of yourself. Or you probably will have a heart attack. Thank you.

Think of my grandma. She's 95 years old, for gosh sake. She has been a vegetarian for over 30 years, and she meditates every day. Think about it.
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