She taught me many things, but mostly Grandmother taught me how to not die. She had a million lessons in how to not die.
Don’t act up or the gypsies will come and take you and you’ll die. It was always the gypsies, and not boogiemen or monsters that would get you. I guess the gypsy fortune tellers employed some sort of video surveillance system of kids everywhere. They must have alerted a gypsy SWAT team that swooped into homes in the middle of the night to kidnap rowdy and unruly kids. This bit of advice gave me nightmares and a fear of horse drawn wagons. I think it’s called Nomadicpsychicdanceraphobia.
Don’t plant an evergreen tree in the front yard or you’ll die. Well you might not die, but someone you want to not die will, in fact, die. It didn’t matter when kind of conifer went in the front yard, it’d still kill somebody. I always wondered if planting a small evergreen bush in the front yard would be a weaker curse and would only make you sick. I never had the guts to try it.
Don’t take anything out of a graveyard or you’ll die. The logic of this rule is sound. If you assume that the graveyard has some sort of supernatural electrical charge then removing something will put it out of balance and make it suck something in to balance it out. I could find a gold nugget the size of my head with a sign on it that says “take me home” and I won’t touch it. If you lay a $10,000 dollar bill on the ground in the cemetery it’ll be there when you return because I’m not taking it through the gate. I intend to continue to not die.
Do obey your Grandmother or it will be bad. She knows everything, as opposed to your parents who don’t know anything. Ignoring her advice is bad. Listen to her and you will not die. I did ignore her once and it was bad. I didn’t die but Grandma cried because I was bad. That was worse than die. It was horrible. I never did that again.
Even if you do everything correctly, someone may die. You can behave, remove the spruce from the front of the house, and respect the cemeteries and still die. Fortune tellers can predict this, Grandma always said. She talked to a gypsy woman who said someone in the family was going to die and 6 or 7 years later they did. That is just scary.
Grandma had a definite opinion of men in the Armed Forces. They were all orphans without families of any sort. They went in the military because they were all alone in the world, without a chance of any kind of life and a dark, lonely future. When I enlisted she was horrified. I might as well have told her I was having my left arm cut off and made into a lamp. She told me I would die far away from home and become a ghost wandering lonely places for all eternity. I went against her wishes and went to the Air Force. It will probably cost me my life. If I draw my last breath and achieve room temperature when I’m 107, from heaven she’ll say, “I told you the military would kill you”.
I’m sure your very own, individualized Grandma had her own rules and advice. The wisdom is a result of living through successfully raising he own kids without killing them. I believe when their last child reaches the age of majority they get a telegram from the International Grandma Council with the location of the secret meeting that imparts wisdom. I think that they all assemble and reach an agreement on how to preserve humanity for another generation. They may even draw rules from a hat that they have to convey to the kids. It’s sort of senior citizen illuminati. Without their secret society we’d suffer. Because of the society we are able to not die.
Make sure you listen to Grandma. If you don’t have one, ask around. There’s probably one you can borrow. It’s best to be safe. We all need to not die.
Fini.
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