Serena could hear her grandmother chuckling in the bedroom that was adjacent to her own. She smiled, thinking about all of the funny stories her Grammy had told her over the years. Serena peeped her head out of her bedroom door to see if she could get a whiff of the comedy. To her chagrin, Grammy’s door was shut and the number one rule in the Lipford household was ‘If the door is closed, leave grown folks alone (unless it’s an emergency)!’ So Rena, as she was affectionately called, sat in the hallway right by Grammy’s door and waited for it open.

For a half hour straight she heard plenty of hearty laughter along with a bunch of, “That child sure was silly”, and “Mm mm mm, those sure were some good days”. But all Rena could do was wonder what child and which days made Grammy chuckle so much. The imaginative ten year old began to ponder over what Grammy was like when she was ten years old and how life might have been way back then. And as her thoughts became a bona fide daydream, the abrupt opening of Grammy’s bedroom door startled her.

“Child, what are you doing with your ten year old behind parked at my doorway? 'Cause if you’re eavesdropping, I’m pretty certain that my room’s got the least amount of action, honey,” said the old brown woman with a smile.

“No Grammy, eavesdropping is rude and inconsiderate. I was just trying to hear what … Uh, yeah, I guess I was eavesdropping. I’m sorry Grammy, but I heard you laughing so hard. I just wanted to laugh hard too. You know you’re the funniest thing this family’s got.”

“Come on in here child, and I’ll show you just what was so funny to me.” Rena’s eyes brightened.

“Grammy, when you’re done showing me what you were laughing about, can you remind me that I’ve gotta ask you something?”

“Ask me know Sweet Stuff,” retorted Grammy.

“Well, I just wanted to know what life was like for you in the old days when you were my age.”

“Ha! The ‘old days’ huh? Either you’re very nosy or extraordinarily insightful, 'cause that’s just what I was in here cryin’ over.”

“Grammy, I’m pretty sure that you were laughing, not crying a little while ago,” said Rena quizzically.

“No baby, back in the day, 'cause that’s what we called the ‘old days’ back then, ‘back in the day’, when we laughed really hard, we said that we were cryin’ ‘cause sometimes the tears would start rollin’ if you laughed hard enough. But sit down girl 'cause I’m about to have you cryin’ up in here honey.”

Grammy went to her closet and pressed the open button on the wall and the closet opened. She pressed another button and a stepladder came out of the floor. The old lady climbed up the ladder so that she could reach the box that was on the top shelf. Rena had never seen the box before and sat anxiously in anticipation. Her grandmother set beside her on the bed and opened the box.

“Now baby girl, these are the good old days.” Grammy smiled as she pulled out some photographs.

“Grammy, just in case you didn’t know, which I’m sure you do because I now you’re very smart, but people don’t own photographs anymore. Technology –”

“Technology, techstinkinnology’! I know about technology, but I happen to like photographs and so do mad people that I know. Technology, tsk! Let me tell you something about technology, Ms. Thing. It was when I was just a little older than you that computers and the Internet started getting very popular. That's when it all took off and everything was about technology. How everything could go faster or get done more quickly. Tryin’ to replace the human being with a bunch of stinkin’ machines! They were tryin’ to build a generation of instantaneous fools is what I say. Many people from my own generation, my own peers even, jumped on that bandwagon, subconsciously though, or so I’d like to think. So child, I do know a little somethin’ somethin’ about technology. So anyway, back to the photographs, if that’s alright with you Ms. Technology.” She cleared her throat.

“That’s fine,” said Serena in a very low tone, smiling from embarrassment.

“Anyway, this here is a picture of me and my first cousin Kayla.” As Grammy flipped through all the numerous pictures contained in the box, a white piece of paper fell to the floor.

Serena went to retrieve it and handed the paper back to her grandmother. “What’s that Grammy?”

“Nosy or insightful, hmm, I don’t know,” said Grammy while pretending to suppress a very obvious grin.

Rena smiled. “I’m not ‘nosy’. I just want to know… Well, uh, yes, I’m nosy! Just tell me what’s on the paper Grammy, please,” importuned the curious child.

Grammy opened up the folded paper and immediately cracked up. “I’m sorry my dear, sweet child. But there is no way that I could ever read this to you. Well, maybe when you’re twenty-one. See, back in the day, I used to write a little bit and this is a poem about our then president, President Bush, the son, not the father. Well, yeah, the father too, I guess. And it has a few profanities in it honey.” Grammy giggled for a few moments to herself. “I wanted to be a rebel so bad.” Grammy’s face suddenly became solemn. “Those were some hard times Rena. But we had some good times too. But President Bush, honey – Whew! Every person that had even a piece of sanity in their brains knew that this sorry sack of you know what was the worst candidate ever to be nominated for anything. This idiot wasn’t even fit to be president of the Britney Spears fan club.”

“Britney who?” interjected Rena.

“Exactly honey. So anyway, you wanna know what it was like back then, huh? Well, baby girl, we had hip hop. Ooooh honey and reggae and neosoul. That’s what I used to like. I wasn’t Grammy then though child.” More hearty chuckles. “The Chicken Head!”, yelled out Grammy in between laughs.

“The Chicken Head?!”, said Serena in disbelief.

“Yes honey. It was a dance that went like this.” The old lady stood to show off her old dance moves. She began moving her body in a way that Serena found hilarious. “And there was the Harlem Shake and the Bank Head Bounce,” demonstrated Grammy. Rena laughed harder than she ever had before. “Whew, child. Grammy’s too old for that mess anymore. I better stop before I throw somethin’ out. But back in the day,” the old woman performed just one last move, “I used to hurt somethin’ at the club.”

“Anyway,” said Grammy as she sat down and attempted to catch her breath quite noisily, “what else? Well, it sure did seem like it cost a whole lot of money to do anything. The whole country was in debt because of buying a bunch of crap that nobody needed. Shoot, the nation itself was in debt. Can you believe that? I mean, the richest, strongest, freest nation in the world, trillions of dollars in debt. Not millions, not billions, but trillions of dollars in debt. And they botherin’ me back in ’98 about a little $458 I supposedly owed in taxes. A lot of nerve. Mm hmm, a lot of things just didn’t make a bit of sense back then baby.” Grammy exhaled loudly, shook her head, and began going through more pictures.

“Oh now, here is a picture of your father when he was a baby. You know, he was born just eight days before ‘9-11’. You do know about that, don’t you?”

“Oh yes, Grammy. That’s when some Middle Eastern country attacked the United States by hijacking two airplanes and flying them into the World Trade Center which was located in one of the five Burroughs of New York.”

“Ha! Is that what they teach you down at that private learning center that you kids attend? Well, I bet that’s what they’d want you to believe. But the truth is,” she spoke in a low, sarcastic voice, “that no good Bush had a brother named Marvin that sat on the Board of Directors for the insurance company that held the policy on the World Trade Center. I believe it was all a setup, honey. And,” said Grammy with the enthusiasm of an investigator that had just cracked his first case, “Poppa Bush, the idiot’s father, had it in for the Iraqi dude, Saddam whatever his name, because Saddam supposedly tried to have him killed. I would’ve helped Ol’ Saddami if he had of asked me. That whole Bush clan was rotten anyway. They had the nerve to call that a war!” Grammy was evidently still outraged by the Bushes. “When you go into a country and kill innocent people just because you have a personal vendetta, wastin’ the public’s money, killin’ the public’s children – That’s no war sweet child, that’s an invasion! My brother died fightin’ for that fool.” Grammy looked away to avoid letting the child see her lose hold over a tear or two.

“But, uh,” Grammy pulled herself together, sniffling and smiling a bit, “fuel, um, gasoline, that’s what we used on our cars back then, expensive as ever, up to six dollars a gallon in some places. You could buy a pack of gum for thirty cents and a decent loaf of wheat bread was about $2.59 or so. We had love and hate, good and evil, foolishness and wisdom just as we do now. We had to work hard to get anything as well as to keep the little bit we did have. Yeah Rena, those were the old days. But I sure thank God for the new ones,” said the old lady with a lovely grin.

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