{ on getting old }

So I walked over to my Russian grandparents’ house today on my break.
[I like starting posts with, "So..." Not overtly professional sounding, but at least you know something good should follow.]
My grandpa is 85, mostly deaf, speaks in super broken English, and I think suffering from at least minor dementia. I think he thought I was a long-lost cousin or wayward daughter or something…because he kept saying, “I am soooo glad to see you after all this time!” Except he said it in way more broken English that I can even effectively type out. And I’m all, “Dude. It’s been like two weeks, Pops.” I found him outside between five HUGE blue barrels of collected rain water (one of his billions of projects), trying to jerry-rig a broken water pump to move the water from one full barrel, into an empty barrel that was directly next to the full one.
Just because.
Then he walked me inside the house, where my Grandma was, and starts pointing at me shouting, “Look! Look!” as if it had been years, and I was the prodigal daughter who had finally returned to demand my chunk of the will. And my still-very-lucid Grandma barely looks up and just says, “Yah, it’s Maddie. What’s the big deal.”