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"I was a real looker back then. Like Carole Lombard," Nana Kay said to me over the weekend, a month before her 95th birthday.

The Nana Kay annual summer tour made a stop at my place on Friday and my mother's house down at the Jersey shore. She was visiting from Florida.

She told us how she met my grandfather, Charlie.

She was 16. They met at a party in Brooklyn. Charlie always had a camera on him. He loved photography. He would snap pictures of her, figuring it would give him an excuse to see her again; to show her the photos he took of her. He was smoove like that.

What she could never know at 16 was that 20 years later he would be scaring the daylights out of her with low blood sugars from a disease he detested and found unacceptable. How his mood would turn dark and roll in like a fast-moving thunderstorm.

"He scared the hell out of me," she told me, getting agitated while she spoke.

"He never told me he was feeling low. I had to yell at him to pull over while he was driving." 

Ironically, when my mother asked if Charlie (my Charlie) needed to be tested about two hours after we had lunch, my grandmother said "no, leave him alone! He'll tell you if he feels low."

Unfortunately, that's not always true.

Charlie bolted into the room, shifted his great big ball made of rubber bands from one hand to the other and gave us the finger. 

Does this happen to you when you test your sugar at family gatherings? Soon everyone was getting their blood sugar tested. Susanne was dishing them out like a Yankee Stadium hot dog vender.

"Sugar checks! Sugar checks! Get your red hot sugar checks!"

We sang happy birthday to Nana and asked how old she was going to be.

"None of your damn business!" she said with a giggle.

You can take the girl out of the Bronx but you can't take the Bronx out of the girl.