My Grandma and The Mets

My grandma passed away last week at age 96, having lived a long and, at least to me, quite remarkable life. Until she had a stroke at age 92, she lived independently, and went out almost every day, to the senior center, the library, the botanic gardens, museums, restaurants, the movies, everywhere. She took classes, wrote poetry, and probably over the course of her life watched at least a thousand Mets games on TV, and maybe quite a few more than that.

In the year or two before her stroke, she and a couple of her friends found themselves in the habit of going to the movies pretty much every weekend. At one point, I had the idea to blog her movie reviews, which, looking back on them now, make me happy I wrote down so many of her words and sad that she’s gone.

I came across one passage about the Mets, from 2008, about a month after Willie Randolph was replaced by Jerry Manuel. I found her take on the Mets at the time to be pretty amusing:

I’ve been watching the Mets game. They’ve been doing so well lately. Maybe they were threatened they would lose their jobs. All of a sudden they all got so good. I know they have the new manager, but he stands in the dugout, he never smiles, he seems like he is not enjoying himself, so I don’t know if he is the one motivating them, but something must be going on because all week they have been winning every game.

I was hoping I’d unearth more baseball-related content from the archives of my posts about her, but, alas, the only way I can post more about my grandma is to venture seriously off-topic.

But if you want to read some pretty amazing stuff from my pretty amazing grandma, her take on Eliot Spitzer’s prostitution scandal and her review of Forgetting Sarah Marshall seem, at least to me, to hold up pretty well. From the Sarah Marshall review:

“And, you know, you wouldn’t believe what thought passed my mind while I was watching the movie — the setting was Hawaii — I have a theory that people from Hawaii are behind this movie, the tourism people — and they paid off these movie makers to make a picture to show how loose everything is in Hawaii and what fun you can have, so people will be stimulated and say, ‘oh, next time I go on vacation I will go to Hawaii,’ and maybe they paid off these movie people just to project an image of Hawaii and how loose things are and how beautiful it is, and the beach, and the weather, and how you can have sex with anyone you want. I wonder if these movie makers were getting paid behind the scenes to advertise Hawaii, where you can sleep with anyone you want and have all that to drink, all those drinks, in the whole movie, and the beautiful beaches, and these ordinary looking, sad men getting the pretty women, I really pictured — not seriously — but I had that thought pass through my mind that this was all just an advertisement for Hawaii. I mean, even I started thinking maybe I want to go there.”