Have you ever told a 78-year-old woman that she needs to get a life? I have. I tell my grandmother that all the time. Okay, maybe I don't exactly say it to her face, but I still say it. The reason is that my grandmother is a lot like my sister. She sleeps all day and then parties all night, only her definition of partying involves Lifetime, HGTV, and a pack of smokes, not beer and the local bar. She has a few friends, including a couple of women that I like to think of as the Meddling Twosome, but they don't do anything together other than talk on the phone. I keep telling my mom that my grandmother needs to get out there and do something--join a bridge club, take an aerobics class for seniors, play bingo at the Catholic church down the street, anything other than sitting on the back porch, smoking her life away.Once my house sells and I move into the apartment off the back of her house, I plan on teaching my grandmother the wonders of the Internet. I honestly don't know that she has ever even seen the Internet. She needs to though. She also needs to set up online banking for all of her bills and auto-refill on her insulin and other prescriptions so that my mother can stop running errands for her every single day.
While I'm setting those things up, maybe I need to introduce her to the wonders of chat rooms as well. At least that way, when she's up all night, she can have someone to talk to. At SeniorChatCity.com, for instance, she can enter Senior Chat Rooms and talk to people her own age all across the world for free, people who are even on her same time schedule. Assuming she manages to brush her hair that day and dress in something other than the Camp Beverly Hills t-shirt that I wore in the fifth grade--she has five closets full of nice clothes but still chooses that middle school hand-me-down--she can even hook up a web cam and chat with other seniors on the site face-to-face. I think that it would do her some good to talk to someone other than the Meddling Twosome. Maybe her new online friends can convince her that she needs to leave her house in the daylight hours from time to time.
Now here comes the difficult part of that scenario. I would probably have to teach my grandmother how to type, change the settings on my computer for that really big type face reserved for the visually impaired, and teach her text message lingo. Consequently, I'm scared that her blond roots might start to show and the whole process of catching her up to the 21st century will take until she is at least 80. Don't even ask me how many times I have had to walk her through the process of turning on and watching a DVD player. To this day her eyes still glaze over when I say, "This is the button for the VCR. This is the button for the DVD player." I'm sure that they'll do the same the first hundred times I say, "This is the button for the monitor. This is the button for the CPU."
I guess if she never gets it, I can string together two cans and tell her Elvis is on the other end. Based on how many cups of coffee and cigarettes she has had, she might actually believe me.
