OPINION: An 80th surprise

Last weekend, I had the honor to help surprise my grandma with a party for her 80th birthday, which just so happened to be on Mother’s Day this year. While the actual planning and work was done by family members who live near her, it still brought me great joy to see all the people from various stages of my grandma’s life coming to celebrate her.

If there’s one thing you need to know about my grandma, it’s that she’s a fairly dramatic woman. This plays in perfectly for a surprise party. She lives in a senior living apartment building, which has a community room between the front door and the elevator. Any time there’s an event, my grandma has to stop on her way in or out of the building to see what’s going on and say hi to everyone.

Normally, this detour leaves us slightly annoyed. My wonderful grandma is a bit of a slow-poke and is easily distracted, so her “little peek” inside the room usually adds another 10 minutes to our supposed exit of the building. However, we were counting on this for the surprise party.

Guests were invited to arrive in the community room by 1 p.m., with my grandma scheduled to arrive by 1:15 p.m. We were impressed that she actually arrived on time, despite not knowing the plan. Someone who normally sleeps in very late, my grandma was enticed out of the building by 9:30 a.m. by her son for a trip to the casino.

At the appointed time, we see her walk up to the front door. While it would take a normal person approximately 30 seconds to go from the front door to the community room, it was another five minutes before my grandma rounded the corner. (She has to check if any of the packages in the hallway are for her, though she doesn’t know how to shop online.)

We stood there waiting for her to poke her head in. Eventually, we saw the very front of her walker, but at that point, she had spotted a couple of my cousins filming her as she walked over and that started the whole sha-bang. Without even knowing about the other 50 people in the room, my grandma was sobbing. Eventually, my mom walked over and herded my grandma further into the room, setting off more water works as she saw the rest of the room.

As the party eventually got started, my grandma flitted from person to person, totally in her element. After probably an hour of this, my sister eventually made my grandma sit down and eat, because if it had been up to my grandma, she would have kept talking the rest of the day.

While my grandma was busy being the life of the party, a few cousins and I went to her storage room where we found some great relics of her past. There were three yearbooks, practically every page signed, including numerous notes saying it was too bad she was going steady because “they would have made a great pair.” We found the photo album from my grandparent’s wedding and were in awe of the fashion and impossibly small waist lines.

Of course, I think my favorite photos we found were of my late grandpa in what appeared to be a photoshoot from his time in the service. While his position as a nuclear weapons specialist for the U.S. Army in the 1960s was serious, it seems the time he spent with his buddies was not. He posed like a model in various photos from the Italian countryside, and it wasn’t hard to see how he caught my grandma’s attention when he arrived back stateside.

While I’m always a fan of history, it’s these family events that really provide a good stepping-stone into family history and lore. Bringing out these photos and yearbooks brought out new stories from my grandma and provided a wonderful opportunity for our extended family to see photos of their own parents and grandparents they might not have seen before.

I’m thankful for all the past and future memories these family get-togethers provide, as well as giving me an excuse to make the trek up to see my grandma. Happy birthday, Grammie!