San Leandro is laid out like a maze. The area my Aunt Amy lives in has about 200+ houses in it, yet only one road running in and out. So, I was totally late picking up Grandma on Sunday for her “day out.” She’s 94 and has a very bad memory so it takes her a while to get used to the whole idea of just going out to party (“Am I going home with you?” “Uh oh I don’t have my suitcase!”). We go drive to meet Kirby at Rasputin’s.
We park in front of the record store and this guy with fully ghetto-fabulous metal caps tries to sell us his self-produced CD. Maybe on the way out, I tell him. Incredibly, ShaColby is just inside the door with some friends. We plug Grandma into some loud dance music (“oooh, this is too much!” “What do you mean, too loud?” “no, just too much!”) and then we show her the store. I think the huge variety was sort of mind-boggling (“this is too much music!”).
Turns out Kirby had already bought the CD from the guy out in front. We were noticing how unprofessionally it was produced… it had no cover art, the insert was a single color flyer done at the copy place, and it didn’t even fit, and also the CD had no label on it and had come straight out of someone’s computer. So on the way out we totally assaulted the guy and told him all the stuff he could be doing to make his product slicker, and he looked at us like we were completely insane. Then we tried to communicate some of this information to Grandma and were going to pass this guy off as some famous rap artist, but it was getting late and we had to move on…
We had planned on taking her to the petting zoo in Hayward, but I heard there was a giant chaotic loud county fair type thing there, with beer and rock bands and junk food. So of course we took her there. It was the Zucchini Festival. Really!
We made her dance to “Brown-Eyed Girl” and showed her swords and professional wrestlers. We kept threatening to make her do stuff (“Hey Grandma, want a tattoo? It will wash off in a week!” “Hey Grandma, let’s do the trampoline thing!” “Hey Grandma, let’s challenge the wrestler!”) and had a blast. We made her shoot rubber band guns.
One of the weirder things was one of the carnie games- it was the standard “win a goldfish” game with a bunch of little bowls resting on a wood lattice, and you throw the ping-pong balls, and if you get one in you win a fish. Except in this one they weren’t giving away fish; they were giving away hermit crabs.
TOM: I can’t explain it, but hermit crabs have more synergy with the zucchini
Kirby and Grandma threw ping pong balls for a while, and Kirby actually won a hermit crab. Just as in the goldfish game, they had a super-ghetto package for the winner to carry his prize- in this case, one of those styrofoam clamshells you take restaurant leftovers home in.
Then we got some junk food. Grandma claimed she didn’t want anything, but we got some crepes and gave her an extra fork, and she ate about half of my strawberry Nutella crepe. She would ask what it was she was eating, and either didn’t understand the answer (what is “Nutella” in Japanese?) or forgot the answer because she kept asking.
So it was a good day.
