What follows is a true story
(As told very, very poorly to Marian over Slack one day)
It’s a semi-biographical account of my grandmother’s life.
She was born in the 30s and grew up in Ohakune. She went to the local high school and dated Leo. She was Anglican, Leo was Catholic, and it was decided by their parents that they were not allowed to marry.
So they finished high school and Vivienne went off to Wellington to study dental nursing, while Leo worked on, and eventually took over his family’s farm. They drifted apart and both eventually married different people.
Vivienne got a job as a dental nurse in a small town primary school (I forget which). She looked after the kids’ teeth and got to know the town. Every couple of weeks, the meter reader from the power company would come to read the meter, and they would have a chat. Then, he started coming every week. Then every other day. Vivienne was befuddled — surely she couldn’t be using that much power? Of course, the meter reader was only there to see her, not to read the damn meter.
Vivienne and Alwyn got married and moved north of Auckland so that Alwyn could work on a national roading project. Once the roading project was finished, the pair opened a grocery store, and later managed a hotel together. They had three children, a boy and two girls. They lived a fairly unremarkable kiwi life together, until, in 1990, Alwyn died of a heart attack.
Around the time of Alwyn’s death, Vivienne’s parents also died, and she inherited a tidy sum. Over the course of a few years she frittered it away on travel and luxuries, until she was finally forced to retire to a small granny flat where she lived quietly for many years.
In 2010, at Christmas, Vivienne’s family gathered at her house, and after some dutch courage she announced, without preamble “So, I am getting married"
In the stunned silence that followed, she explained that she was selling her house and moving to Tauranga.
As it happens, she had reconnected with Leo and had been seeing him for several months
A month or so earlier, Leo’s wife had died of cancer, and Vivienne and Leo, not caring (apparently) about respect for the dead, and seemliness, had decided to get married.
Vivienne decided to convert to catholocism.
They invited their family to their small wedding in the lounge of Leo’s Tauranga home. The officiant was a 25 year old priest wearing robes and playing with an iphone.
Vivienne’s family were apprehensive, and several of them took Leo aside privately to ask if he was sure about this. ‘No give-backs’, they said
Vivienne and Leo lived happily ever…. oh wait, no. That’s not what happened.
Just shy of a year later, Vivienne announced that she was leaving Leo. “I can’t live like that”, she complained, “He’s so boring!"
Broke, single, and in her 70s, Vivienne decided _fuck it_ and moved back to Northland.
But she still loved Leo. So occasionally, the two of them would meet up and they would take a camper van and go on holiday together, sometimes surprising children and grandchildren by turning up in their town unannounced and demanding to be taken out for lunch
(This is all a true story. There’s also a hilarious but sad sub-plot about a cat)
My nanna is a bad-ass bitch who doesn’t give a fuck. THE END.