Table 13

I should write more down about my Mother's Mother. Nonna, as I call her.

In her sixties, as a single woman, she lived in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Yes, think Trans-Alaska pipeline, grizzly bears, and men. She was the manager of the hotel/restaurant and in charge of all the food and special events for the men. (She threw a Luau once and had dancers flown in from Hawaii! Large budget in the oil fields?)

To make a really long story short:

She was falling in love with a man there. One day the man stops coming in to see her. A new man starts pursuing her. She later marries new guy. New guy was her 6th husband and the one I knew as my Grandpa. But we didn't call him that. Just Jim.

Jim dies.

Old guy from Prudhoe Bay comes back into the picture (just months before her death and no, not the guy who killed her) and says that back in the day, Jim threatened him to leave her alone and that's why he suddenly disappeared.

I think her marriage to Jim sucked, from what I could tell. I cracked open one of her journals once a few years ago and my eyes went straight to this sentence... There is no companionship in this marriage. Like a reflex, I slammed it shut. It was close to home and I wished then that she was alive so I could talk to her, get to know her now that I was an adult.

Perhaps she pined for the first guy who courted her at Table 13.

I'm only guessing it was Table 13 because that was the title of the unfinished novel on her word processor when she died: Table 13! Yes, she was writing a novel about love working on the pipeline. I wish she lived to finish it. Can you imagine?

Who goes to Alaska to live in their sixties? Alone?!

Also randomly interesting: I guess lots of the buildings were trailers. A grizzly hibernated underneath one (the kitchen!) all season and no one knew it until he woke up.

Why am I up and writing down all these random histories? Because Brandon is fixing our TV and I can't watch the recorded Bachelor. So I'm stuck doing something sort of productive... CRAP.

So who killed Nonna, anyway?

Acute blunt force trauma to the head. That's waaay too common of a death certificate in this family. She was on a trip in Wyoming with some dude (yes, at 72). She didn't like him, just friends. He says he leaves the hot springs to go change his clothes and comes back to find her floating face down. All they found was a teeny-tiny bruise on her head and concluded she slipped, bumped, and drowned. All while he went to change?

He just so happened to be ex-military and told Nonna once he was trained to kill a man one hundred different ways. He made her a bent fork with the prongs mangled that went around your fist and was to be used like brass knuckles. Hello, creepy. I remember looking at those things and thinking what. in. the. heck. Hello, buy the woman mace if you think she needs self-defense.

This man also told my Mom, very casually, that his children disowned him because they all thought he killed their mother and covered it up. He's telling my Mom this fresh back from Wyoming, body not in the ground. And told it coldly. Fishy much? She didn't like him. Perhaps he came on to her and she rejected him? Write THAT murder mystery!

I guess we'll never know.

It's weird to think about what the adults were up to while you were an oblivious kid. There was a love triangle playing out above the Arctic circle and all I got was the lousy t-shirt... "Go Climb a Rock! Prudhoe Bay, AK" from my Grandma in the mail. It was a color-yourself t-shirt so I guess that was cool...