Sound Blog

a story about my grandma · May 14, 2005 by Matt Gilbert

My grandma was quite a character. In fact, I never knew her except as a character in several stories that my dad told me about her. Like the one when she taught him how to kill a chicken when he was four years old. In one such story, she’s sitting on the front porch in steamy, humid, north Louisiana in her nightgown, dipping snuff with the frayed end of a twig and spitting into a Folger’s tin that she kept with her at all times. Her dog, Charlie, had been chasing around an armadillo all morning. Charlie was the fattest dog you’ve ever seen, which is why he couldn’t manage to catch an armadillo. He ran around and barked for hours, in spite of Grandma barking back at him with every obscenity in her vocabulary, which was extensive. Charlie trapped the armadillo in the culvert, a concrete tube that lets the ditch continue under the driveway. As he hopped in and out of the ditch, darting from one end of the pipe to the other, his barks resonated in the pipe, making them that much louder. It must have terrified the poor, stupid armadillo. The noise only made my grandma more irritated. Now her voice couldn’t even be heard over the barking, and since they had stopped running around all over the yard, she could finally put a stop to this without having to chase anyone down. So, the obvious thing to do, was to get the shotgun. My grandma kept a double-barrel shotgun around for defense and for rascals. She didn’t have to go get it, because it was laying on the porch right by her rocking chair. She marched over to the culvert, cocked both barrels, knocked Charlie aside with the end of the shotgun and shoved it halfway into the culvert. If you’ve ever thrown an M-60 into a culvert and heard the PFTHOOOM that it makes, you have some idea of what it must have sounded like a few miles away when Grandma pulled the trigger. Charlie yelped, locked his tail between his legs and dashed off to hide under the porch. The armadillo didn’t hear a thing. After that mess was over with, the rest of the day was very peaceful.

Commenting is closed for this article.