Stolen from
ursulav. All credit to her and her wonderful sense of humor.
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“Would you look at that?” said my grandmother, once upon a time. “Says here that more couples get divorced than get married.” She and her boyfriend/chief worshiper were sitting around the kitchen table, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper, a ritual they conducted every morning.
Being eight, I did not question the statistical difficulties with this, but accepted that, as Grandma seemed to think, this was a harbinger of the collapse of civilization. Grandma was exceedingly clever but not terribly good at higher math.
The irony here was that if anybody was contributing to the divorce rate, it was Grandma, who went through husbands the way a dog goes through chew toys. She had been a regular Rosie the Riveter type during the war–-married at sixteen, a mother at seventeen, and widowed at eighteen, as the saying goes. After that, she had decided three years was about the active shelf-life of a husband, and had proceeded to marry, marry, and marry again. (In fairness, I think she would have liked them to last longer, but she tended to burn them out along the way. It’s hard to marry a goddess.) Generally she got divorced afterwards, although occasionally they died, which grieved her terribly but did save paperwork.
All this makes her sound like a terrible person, so the thing I have to point out here is that the men were mostly not complaining. It wasn’t just that she was compassionate, warm, and big-hearted. Grandma had charisma. She wasn’t just conventionally likable, she was slightly more than human. When you were around her, you were on a grand and absurdly fun adventure. Going to the grocery store with her was better than going to Six Flags with lesser mortals. She had the mojo.
So the ex-husbands that piled up tended to be exhausted, but hopeful. Occasionally she would marry the same one twice. On at least one occasion, several of them went in together and bought her a house. She really was more like a goddess with worshipers than anything else, although being a devout Catholic, she would have denied any such comparison.*
*The trick for how she got all those marriages annulled was equally impressive, and required finding an impressionable young priest and weeping on his shoulder about how she’d thought it had been anulled, but apparently it hadn’t and oh god, she was a bigamist and going to hell now and what could she doooo? The priest, no more immune to the mojo than anybody else, would immediately promise to fix this terrible muddle for the nice lady. This trick only worked once per priest, but Grandma moved a lot.