Christmas, Shotguns, and Ash-trays

Winnie is traditional in the extreme. Her traditionalism is a feat upon hearing about my Grandma Tiny. It’s astonishing when you think about a four foot ten inch women chucking a seven foot Christmas tree, out the front door. Every Christmas Tiny tossed the tree out onto the front lawn. After putting up the lights, candy canes and tinsel, Winnie and my Uncle Bud would gaze at it sadly and think what a pity it was that this beautiful tree would eventually end up in a heap on the front lawn, being picked apart by squirrels and peed on by the neighbor’s dog.

I remember hearing about the time she pulled a gun on the Avon lady’s son for putting his sticky fingers on her china cabinet. And how she once chased a man who stole a strong box of cash from the office of the motel she owned, firing a heavy shotgun repeatedly, exploding the back window of the pick-up he was driving. I remember asking her once if she was just trying to scare him or blow out his tires to stop him. She said, “Hell no! I was trying to kill that bastard!”

Killing bastards was something Tiny did very well. She didn’t so much kill them as make them wish they were dead, or had never born. She was as cold and unpredictable as a Minnesota winter. Consequently, most of her childhood poor, little Winnie was perpetually chilled.

Tiny despised Pap deeply. She despised his “muddy eyes” and his “oily, sludge like skin” Tiny was so spiteful that after Winnie and Pap had "converted" themselves into healthy, observant, well on their way to exaltation Mormons, she calculatingly sent him ash-trays for Christmas. She would often say “He only wants to marry you so he won’t have to eat beans and tortillas for the rest of his life.”

Pap didn’t even like beans and tortillas, he preferred fillet minion and shrimp with lobster sauce. Even when Tiny died, with her last breath she remarked that Winnie had wasted the best years of her life by “co-mingling with dark and loathsome flesh”. And that he was nothing more that a "filthy, interloping, immigrant". Conveniently disregarding the fact that she herself sailed passed the feet of Lady Liberty as a young, dirty Italian girl. Her last words were "You've been such a disappointment" Winnie replied softly, as she stroked her withered transparent fore-head,
“I’ll miss you too mommy.”