The Grandma MacInerny Series
Grandma MacInerney has lived in the same house ever since her husband built if for her in a new neighborhood full of newlyweds and young families with children. She was an active lady in her younger days, and produced three active children, one living near her, and the other two somewhere in the world doing good.
She has always had a garden, flowers and trees in her front yard, and vegetables and fruit trees in her back garden. She tended them all as long as she could, and then her hip gave out and she had it replaced. It was an ordinary hip, and it was installed in the absolutely wrong way, and it always hurt, even after it was steel and titanium.
After that she found a laboratory making prosthetics and signed a long-term contract to become a guinea pig. She now has a much better hip, an electronic shoulder, and microchips in her toes. She gardens every day, trims her own trees, argues with her daughter, teaches her granddaughter, and if she doesn’t exactly protect her neighbors, she at least keeps an eye out for them once in a while, and is a fervent advocate of neighborhoods looking out for their own. However, she has a little problem with her image.
“Poor darling! I should start one of those pages on my computer so everyone can keep up. After all, before long a lot of people are going to be getting replacements, whether they are computerized or not, and they will want to tell their friends and their daughter’s friends how they are doing, too.”
“That would be wonderful, mother.”
Grandma MacInerney’s granddaughter was sitting on the sofa, trying not to laugh, but thought her mother didn’t think it was wonderful. The girl was named Emma, a nice old-fashioned name, but not one that went with a mechanical grandmother, which is what some of her snootier girl-friends called Grandma. They thought her name ought to be something like Zing!, always spelled with an exclamation point, or What Next? with a question mark.
