GANGSTER GRANNY first appeared in Medium.

One morning, I wake up to an accusatory and largely inaccurate email. I haven’t recovered from that smackdown when I’m on the phone negotiating with a healthcare provider on behalf of my elderly mother. The “provider” gaslights me and refuses to help in any way.

Hoping to reduce my stress, I book an end lane at the pool. I choose the end lane because of my poor technique. I learned to swim in my thirties. “Learned” is a generous way of describing my signature stroke, frantic thrashing while keeping my head as far out of the water as possible. I slide into my empty lane, relieved to start a thirty-minute respite from reality. Ten minutes in, I reach a flow state of swimming bliss. Well, as much of a flow state as anyone can achieve while thrashing.

With my head up out of the water, I spot a woman climbing into the pool. I often see her in the locker room. In her nineties, she reminds me of a no-nonsense Katherine Hepburn:  stylish, sun-wrecked, gray hair and wrinkled fair skin that evidences a lifetime of little or no sunscreen. She speaks with a clipped, high-pitched fake British accent, like American actresses in 1940s movies. The nonagenarian wears her jewelry into the water: thick gold bracelet, earrings, and a jumbo-sized necklace. When I first saw her, the proliferation of bling inspired me to dub her the Gangster Granny.

I assume she’ll enter the adjacent empty lane. But no, she straps yellow paddles onto her hands, slips into flippers, then swims the backstroke, down the middle, coming straight at me. Treading water is not within my skill set.  I cling to the side, yelling, “Ma’am, I’m in this lane.”

            She whacks me hard with her yellow paddle. The foam paddle doesn’t hurt, but the insult stings.

I force myself to believe the whack is unintentional. My fragile psyche can’t entertain the possibility of a third negative encounter that day. However, at our next side-by-side meeting, she thunks me harder and means it.

            I wait at the shallow end. When the aged scofflaw senses my presence, she flips her backstroke early then cruises away. I shout, “Hey, you’re taking up both sides.”

            Gangster Granny ignores me.

I walk as fast as I can in the water. “Stop!” My voice sounds feeble. Pitiful, even.

            She doesn’t stop. Instead, she declares, “My friend gave me this whole lane. I can swim here any time I want. You need to leave!” She doesn’t say the word “peasant,” but I hear it in her tone.

            I want to scream, “That’s not a thing!” But clearly, Gangster Granny does not comprehend that you must reserve one half of a lane in your own name prior to swimming.

            The woman has now stolen my last fifteen minutes of happy time. I consider asking the lifeguard to intervene. Doubtless, high drama would ensue, so I skulk off to the warm pool, otherwise known as the Pee Pee Pool. Surrounded by toddlers, I grab a noodle and float limply. I enter a zone, not bliss this time, more a Dante’s Inferno zone. My mind relives the indignities of the day.

I’ve seen Gangster Granny twice since that encounter. Once when she flies through a three-way stop in her top-down convertible at the entrance of our gym parking lot. Sporting black sunglasses and a Jackie Kennedy scarf wrapped around her head, she comes within inches of T-boning me.

The last time I saw Gangster Granny, I’m at the back of a long checkout line at a grocery store next to the gym. She runs in as fast as a ninety-year-old can run, then shouts at the cash register guy. “Help! There’s a bird trapped in your foyer.” She points to the entry.

Almost every time I visit the store, the same young clerk sits there, exuding misery. He communicates in low energy nods, unless he deigns to mutter a brief sentence dripping with irony, like responding to “Have a nice day,” by saying, “Yeah, YOU try and have a nice day.” 

All Gangster Granny’s pleas don’t inspire him to glance her way. She realizes this world-weary malcontent is not going to budge. She grabs a box, traps the bird without crushing it, then releases it, all within a minute. Very impressive. She returns the container then declares in her Kathryn Hepburn voice, “I’ve released the bird to the wild.” By which she meant into the asphalt parking lot of the mostly abandoned mall.

            After the bird incident, I revise my thinking. 

            Maybe I should give Gangster Granny a break. She’s had to put up with a lot in her younger days. For a good stretch of her life, she couldn’t get a loan or credit card in her name and had limited education and career opportunities. Given what she’s had to endure, no wonder she behaves in a manner one might generously describe as assertive. At least Gangster Granny seems to care about the environment.

            Remember that Dylan Thomas poem, Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night? perhaps this woman has chosen “not to go gentle” into her last years and instead is energetically “raging against the dying of the light.” I think I’ll extend Gangster Granny a little grace. However, whenever I spot her behind the wheel or in a bathing suit, I definitely will duck for cover.