Grandma v. Granma

Wisdom of the Ages...and the Aging

distilled through P.J. O'Rourke:

My grandmother knew how to say what she damn well pleased, not that she ever would have said "damn." As a boy I asked her what the difference was between Democrats and Republicans. She said, "Democrats rent."
Once, when I remarked on slum conditions as we drove through a bad part of town, my grandmother said, "No one's ever so poor he can't pick up his yard."
And when I came home from college declaring that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were both fascist pigs and I was a Communist, she said—take heed, Bernie—"at least you're not a Democrat."
Going through family photographs I realize that my grandmother cultivated old age. By the time she was 40 her affect was Margaret Dumont opposite Groucho Marx in A Night at the Opera—if Groucho had been the straight man.
In 1966, when the Post Office issued its 6-cent FDR commemorative, my grandmother said, "My friends and I are having trouble using that new Roosevelt stamp."
"Why?" I asked.
"We keep spitting on the wrong side."