A 2009 email from my Granny

My maternal Gran passed away this morning. She was 99.

AMUSING SIDENOTE: I was her oldest grandchild. When I was about ten years old, she made a request to all of us to call her Granny, not Grandma. She thought “Grandma” made her sound too old. 😀

I received tons of emails from Gran over the last 17 years or so. She was pretty hip like that, sporting an AOL address since before there was even such a thing as Google.

Chain emails that seem so vintagely cliche now were a daily thing for me back in the early days. There were a few awesome Granny emails that were lost in an email crash back in the nineties — personal emails that gave me inside info on how she met my grandfather — and it totally bums me out that I no longer have them. But they’ll always be in my head.

I just did a quick search in my dusty old Yahoo inbox and found an email from Gran that dates back to a relatively recent August 2009. Funny to see this now, as 2009 was the year I was writing the anagram-driven Under Angels novel.

I’ll spare you the font choices and colored rubberband background, but it went something like this:

This has got to be one of the cleverest
E-mails I’ve received in awhile.
Someone out there
is deadly at Scrabble.
(Wait till you see the last one)!

DORMITORY:
When you rearrange the letters:
DIRTY ROOM

PRESBYTERIAN:
When you rearrange the letters:
BEST IN PRAYER

ASTRONOMER:
When you rearrange the letters:
MOON STARER

DESPERATION:
When you rearrange the letters:
A ROPE ENDS IT

THE EYES:
When you rearrange the letters:
THEY SEE

GEORGE BUSH:
When you rearrange the letters:
HE BUGS GORE

THE MORSE CODE:
When you rearrange the letters:
HERE COME DOTS

SLOT MACHINES:
When you rearrange the letters:
CASH LOST IN ME

ANIMOSITY:
When you rearrange the letters:
IS NO AMITY

ELECTION RESULTS:
When you rearrange the letters:
LIES – LET’S RECOUNT

SNOOZE ALARMS:
When you rearrange the letters:
ALAS! NO MORE Z ‘S

A DECIMAL POINT:
When you rearrange the letters:
IM A DOT IN PLACE

THE EARTHQUAKES:
When you rearrange the letters:
THAT QUEER SHAKE

ELEVEN PLUS TWO:
When you rearrange the letters:
TWELVE PLUS ONE

AND FOR THE GRAND FINALE:

MOTHER-IN-LAW:
When you rearrange the letters:
WOMAN HITLER

Yep! Someone with waaaaaaaaaaay
too much time on their hands!

Rest in peace at last, dear Gran. Give my love to Grandpa. <3

With Grandpa and Granny on their 70th wedding anniversary, July 25, 2009.