Broken cookies

My Grandma Cole sold her house in Berkeley Michigan in about 1955.
The story was that she was too old to take care of it anymore.
The rumor was that my Aunt Pauline and Uncle Russell needed help with the down payment on their new house in Warren.
After my Grandmother sold her house it was decided, not by her I'm sure, that she would live with each of her children on a rotating basis.
I remember when she moved in with us. She got the small bedroom. I think I had to move in with my parents, my sisters, I don't remember which.
I don't remember much about her. She was old. She liked to watch wrestling on Friday nights, and scream at the bad guys, and yell at my dad to shut up whenever he laughed and told her that it was all fake.
She used to send my sister D, I think D was her favorite, kindred spirits or something, down to the corner store to buy bananas. The bananas were for grandmother, not to share, just for her, and this pissed my mother off to no end.
My most vivid memory is that she chewed Mail Pouch flaked tobacco and had a spittoon next to her chair that was fashioned out of an old three pound Chase and Sanborn coffee can.
I looked in the can a couple times, and it was gross, maybe the grossest thing I had ever seen.
After a few weeks she moved on to another relative, another of my aunts and uncles.
A few weeks after that she moved on to the hospital, she had some kind of cancer.
I remember while she was in the hospital we drove out there. My dad went in to visit her and my mother and my sisters and I stayed in the car. I remember that it seemed like my dad was in there forever.
We sat in the car and complained about how hungry we were, about how really hungry we were.
Then my dad came out and we stopped at the Oven King Cookie Factory Outlet Store and bought two big bags of broken cookies for 49 cents a bag, and the hunger was sated and all was right with the world.
My grandmother passed away not too long after that.
She passed away on my birthday.
The birthday that I stepped on a rusty nail and I had to get a tetanus shot.
I remember at the funeral home, I fell, or had my feelings hurt, or something like that, and I saw my mother talking to another woman and I ran up to her and buried my head in her skirts and started crying.
Except I had buried my head in the wrong skirts, they were my Aunt Ruby's skirts, an aunt I never knew I had, and my Aunt Ruby and my mother laughed, and this embarrassed me even more, and then my mother told my Aunt Ruby that I had just had a birthday, and my Aunt Ruby reached into her purse and gave me a dollar, and I stopped crying, and life went on.