My Grandmother: The Original Wedding Crasher

A couple of months ago, I was driving my grandmother up to Bennington and we were chatting about when she was growing up in Lasingburgh and how she spent the time.

She starts telling me about how in Lansingburgh, they found a lot of ways to entertain themselves. And this conversation starts to get very, very interesting. My grandmother tells me that she and her sister and some of the neighborhood kids used to get all dressed up and go to a bunch of weddings. Nothing terribly unusual there, until I ask her how she got invited to all of these weddings she was telling me about.

Grandma's response was, "Oh, we didn't know anyone at the wedding. We just went whenever we saw there was one going on."

Apparantly, people rarely asked why she was there, and if they did, she would simply reply that she was distant family of the bride or groom. She went for the free food and the dancing, and her mother fully sanctioned it since it got a few of the kids out of the house for a while.

I just sat there, blinking and processing this before I finally opened my mouth again.

"So you were a wedding crasher, Grandma?"

My grandmother smiled and responded with a simple, "Yes."

The more I know of my grandparents, the more astounded I am.