Team Nana

Last week, I drove 7 hours across the entirety of Pennsylvania to visit my grandma right outside of Pittsburgh in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Nana is very organized, very empathetic, and very Catholic. She’s lived in Pittsburgh her entire life – Swissvale and Braddock – and she is, I have to assume, the single biggest Pittsburgh Pirates fan in the world.

Another important thing about Nana is that she’s never wrong and all her takes are 100% correct. I will brook no criticism or questions on this point.

• Nana told me that she doesn’t understand why people live together before they get married. She said, “Well, if I’d lived with [your grandfather] before we got married, we would never have gotten married.” She also told me that she thinks the reason that God put them in each other’s lives was so that she could save his soul.

• Nana thinks that Ghislaine Maxwell is possibly more culpable than Epstein. I asked her whether she thinks that someone killed Epstein, or whether she thinks he killed himself. “Oh, of course, someone killed him,” she said.

• Nana is upset that the Pirates traded Hayes, her favorite player. She also hates the manager of the Pirates and wishes Mark Cuban had bought them, which he was apparently considering. Nana is an avid Shark Tank fan, so this union would have been deeply exciting.

• Nana asked me if I still did puzzles. I said yes, but explained that we had no room in our apartment for puzzles—no kitchen table, no desk. She responded by giving me a 1,000 piece puzzle of Pope Francis (see previous post for said photo—I can’t bring myself to link it for two posts in a row.)

• Nana and I bond often over our shared animosity towards Trump. I was telling her that I hope he gets impeached and removed from office, and she said that she hopes God “intervenes” to take him out of office. I love this phrasing: so delicate. So much plausible deniability.

• Nana and I went grocery shopping. While we were checking out, I outmaneuvered her and bought the groceries. She was, of course, furious. “You don’t have extra money to be buying my groceries,” she said. “No, actually, Nana, we do now! Scott got a new job and he’s making way more money now,” I said. “Oh,” she said. “I should have gotten steaks, then.”

• Nana LOVES Scott. She told me that she knew we’d get married when the two of us visited her in 2021. “He did all the dishes,” she said. “And I saw the way he looked at you.” Truly, a winning combination.