How We Met - My Grandmother Did WHAT?!

One of the first people I asked/begged to write a guest post was Brittany. I have been blog stalking her for some time now. Her blogs (yes blogs) are full of blogging advice, product reviews, parenting tips and most recently an ode to Brad Pitt. She is always kind and full of encouragement. 

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While I would love to tell a massively romantic Twilight Saga-esque tale about how my husband and I met, alas it would bore you to death. We met at the Internet. No I mean that as AT the Internet no ON the Internet. We both started working for America Online {remember that dinosaur?} on the same day. It went downhill from there. 

Digressing....

So instead I could tell you how my  my parent's first date was at Disney Land.  I could make you giggle at the story of when she flew into LAX to be picked up by this guy she was about to go on the world's most epic date with when he shows up on a motorcycle. 

He showed up at an airport to pick up a girl who was flying in for the weekend on a motorcycle. 

Boy that had to be a fun trip with all her luggage balancing on her head. Yes, my Dad was blond. I miss that man. He made me laugh.

And once again it all went downhill from there. So let's try my grandparents.

A few years before my grandparents passed away, the subject of their dating life came up. Who would have thought that my grandmother's 80+ year old memory worked so well? Let me set the stage.

While the men (and by men I mean my father, my uncle, and my grandfather) sat in the living room watching some sporting event they were all pretending to care about (cool factor you know) the ladies of the family surrounded the dining room table at a heated game of Yahtzee. 

(Seriously, our Yahtzee games are viscous)

Between dice rolls we would crack jokes, make threats, and tell stories. Suddenly my eighty something year old grandmother (who I swear cheated at Yahtzee, I mean seriously no one is THAT good) announced she had a secret she had to tell us about how she snagged my grandfather. Well of corse at this point we were all ears, not just because we KNEW that it was a shotgun wedding (we all could do basic math...you know, the eldest child's birth was just a few months after the wedding so like, um, duh) but because the fact my grandmother was this quiet, innocent old woman who couldn't hurt a fly and she had a secret to spill. We just had to hear this.

You also need to keep in mind this was the late thirties, when certain things just weren't done. Well obviously they WERE done, just nobody talked about it.

Anywho...she was so proud of herself when she recounted how she was so in love with my grandfather. She loved him so much but she just knew he was interested in another girl besides her. Some days he would come visit her, others he would not. She would see his truck at another girls house and she would see red and green (anger and jealousy folks). One day she had had enough. He was over at her place and they were talking about getting serious when he mentioned leaving early. She didn't want him to go, she wanted to have some extra time making him fall in love with her, so while he was busy getting freshened up for his next date (she assumed), she ran outside and poured all the sugar from her mother's sugar canister into his gas tank.

Yes, my meek, mild mannered grandmother poured sugar into her boyfriends gas tank.

So of corse he never made it to his next date, he spent the evening at my grandmothers waiting for one of his brothers to come pick him up and tow his truck to the shop to figure out what was wrong with it (he had no idea what she had done). Not to get into too many details but obviously something happened that night because less than a year later they were wed and had a baby. My grandmother was a conniving woman.

The funniest part about the whole story was after she was done telling her devilish deed, my pretty much DEAF grandfather yells out...

"It was YOU?! You poured the sugar into my gas tank?!" 

Yup, after over 60 years of marriage she had never confessed. Bravo, grandma, bravo.

You can find Brittany on Facebook, twitter, her blog The Butterfly Mom