Q: Is grandma an adverb?

A: For the fifth and final time, your grandmother is a noun. A noun with feelings. A living, breathing, dying, decaying, wilting, judgmental, evil noun. A noun who sacrificed her life to make my dreams come true. When those dreams turned out to be little more than standing on the street corner yelling at cars with out-of-state plates and whistling at the girls from the girl's school as they walked home, she sacrificed her life to make your dreams come true. When your dreams turned out to be little more than throwing empty beer cans at cars with out-of-state-plates and exposing yourself to the mannequins at Kohls, she switched gears and began sacrificing chickens and goats and stray cats and mail-order brides and rare plants she grew in her garden in the alley in the hope that she might summon some long-forgotten god who would punish us for our wicked ways.

Your grandmother is a noun. And it's about time you started showing her a little respect.

No, not right now. I didn't mean drop everything and start paying her respect this instant. She's edgy today and any attempt at respect will be misinterpreted as an attack. Then it's pepper spray and throwing stars and the bolo with the wire dipped in broken glass. I just hosed down the deck this morning. I'm not doing the same work twice in one day. No, we can pay our respects later, once she's been bound and  sedated and put back in her cage.

Oh. Boy. She must have been listening. She's perking up now and it looks like she's talking to some of her rats. That's never good. Those conversations never result in a a rat pyramid or an all-rat reenactment of the famous Stanford-Cal kick return. Those conversations always end in murder by rat. One time I'd like to see them try something new. The rats are so creative and she's really holding them back.

They're coming now. And grandma's shouting, "Murder!" Damn, she even made a sign.

I guess this is it. One of us should create a diversion and the other one should run down the block and finish the Mad-Lib. At least one of us should be mildly entertained. We'll shoot for it. Paper. Rock. Scissors.

Ready? One. Two. Three. Shoo-

And you're running away.
And here come the rats.
They are so well organized.