He could explain what "great-grandmother" means

Mike wrote in 2 tell what happed shortly after Merrie threw her own Super Teddy in2 the plant:

April,

Formerly little sis. After my lovely Deanna realized Super Teddy had not done permanent damage to her indoor plant, she did something which she has not done in many years, i.e. displayed a sense of curiosity. Deanna has had her moments of being curious in the past, but since she has had children it is like they sucked all the curious bones in her body out with their vigorous breast-feeding. Deanna informs me that bones are not actually the source of breast milk, so I had to discard that theory.

Regardless of the reason for the curiosity, I was delighted and surprised that my lovely Deanna asked me the question, “What have you two been up to?” I put my hands in my pockets and sheepishly followed my daughter into the kitchen where she showed her the photo albums. I said, “We were going through my mom’s photo albums.” Naturally, this is not truly an explanation for why my daughter produced a duplicate of my Super Teddy and felt the need to throw him into Deanna’s indoor plant; but curiosity occurs so infrequently with my wife, I thought it was best not to discourage it with mundane things like a logical progression of thought.

I sat down and put my daughter in my lap so she could see the photo album better, as Deanna pulled it over to the other side of the table. I said, “Merrie was asking about Grampa Jim. She didn’t recognize him.” I know I had tried to avoid embarrassing my daughter with that fact before, but I felt Deanna needed to know, since she is the mother. Deanna said, “He looks so young in this picture…and so does Marian.” It did occur to me that perhaps I need to give my lovely Deanna a little lecture on the progression of time, so she would know that in every picture where Grampa Jim looks young, everyone else in the picture will look younger too. The understanding of how time works is something most people may take for granted, but when you are a Patterson, it can sometimes be a very tricky thing. All I have to do is think about how you looked just before your 16th birthday and how you looked on your 16th birthday, to illustrate my point about unusual Pattersonian time passage. Once again, I opted not to pursue this line of thought with my wife. I thought it would be good to keep that curiosity thing going.

Well, Deanna turned into a silhouette, so her lights were essentially out, and I decided to talk to my non-silhouetted daughter instead. I said, “I’m sorry you never got to meet your great-grandmother, Meredith.” After I said that, I realized it was a little awkward to say. After all, Gramma Marian died in 1991, and in 1991 I was only 15 years old, and it would have been strange to have a daughter when I was still in senior secondary school, just so I could introduce her to Gramma Marian. Fortunately for me, my daughter saved the day by making a joke out of the word “great.” She said, “What made her great, daddy?” At least I think she was making a joke. We do call Grampa Jim “Grampa Jim” around her, and not “great grandfather Jim”, so she might not understand how the word “great” fits in. However, I prefer to think she was making a joke, since it gave me a fine opportunity to look wide-eyed into the open air and say, “Everything.”

I think you would agree, formerly little sis, that “everything” made Gramma Marian great. For example, her extraordinary Tupperware collection. It’s not everyone who saves every single piece of Tupperware they ever bought in their entire life. That makes someone “great,” don’t you agree? You know this to be true, because you met Gramma Marian. However, my daughter never did, so I decided to start showing my daughter some Gramma Marian pictures and I will probably tell you about them tomorrow and I expect I will be using the word “great” as often as I possibly can, in order to carry on my new theme for photos “Marian put the ‘great’ in great gramma.”

Love,
Michael Patterson

Mike, I h8 2 contradict U, but... W8, who R we kidding, I luv 2 contradict U, but what I was going 2 pt ot is that Grandma Marian died in 1998, when U were 22. But U and Dee were just d8ing @ the time, not married or even engaged, so it wdn't have made sense 4 U 2 have had Merrie yet, eh?

I think the comedian Laura Kightlinger did the joke better: "My grandmother asked me, 'When am I going to be a great-grandmother?' And I told her, 'When U do sumthing outstanding!'" But that's OK, Merrie's not quite 5, and Laura Kightlinger has had yrs and yrs 2 work on her stand-up material.

Apes