I laughed my head off.

This was awesome! I had a grandma who was driving a Mustang convertible!

“What happened to the Impala?” Mom asked.

“That old thing? I traded it in,” Gram said. “I didn’t mention it because you would’ve told me I was nuttier than a box of Cracker Jack buying a convertible at my age.”

Mom wouldn’t have said it like that, but whatever she did say, and whatever she was thinking at the moment, meant the exact same thing.

Gram finished by saying, “But I don’t care, because I love it!”

Gram driving around in a Mustang with the top down hardly proved that she needed rescuing. If you ask me, it proved the exact opposite.

It also maybe proved something else that made me really glad. Maybe the Mustang proved that Gram wasn’t quite as sad about Grandpa as she’d been the last time we’d seen her.

“A red convertible was actually the first thing on my WBL,” Gram said as we got into the car.

“WBL?” I asked. “What’s a WBL?”

“Yes, Mother,” Mom said. “What, pray tell, is a WBL?”

“A widow’s bucket list,” Gram said matter-of-factly.

“A widow’s bucket list?!” Mom and I said in unison again.

“You’ve heard of a bucket list—a list of things people want to do before they die.”

“Yes, Mother, I know what a bucket list is.”

“Well, since your father died, God rest his soul, my list is a widow’s bucket list.”

“Is there something besides the Mustang you’re not telling me?” Mom asked.

“Just that the Mustang is only the beginning.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mom said sounding concerned.

“You’ll see,” Gram said in a singsongy voice.

Mom took a deep breath and sighed loudly, but I laughed again as Gram turned and winked at me in the back seat.

Then Gram reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a leopard-print scarf.

What happened next is an example of the challenge involved in hanging out with old people. They do really wacky things, sometimes without even realizing how utterly inappropriate they are.

Gram folded the scarf in half diagonally, put it on her head, and tied it snugly under her chin.

(If you want to know the truth, she looked like a cleaning woman who had just stolen a sports car.)

Maybe you’ve forgotten by now that Gram was always paranoid about messing up her hair. I guess she wasn’t going to take any chances that any of her straw-like strands of hairspray-coated hair would fly in the wind as we drove with the top down.

But the wackiness didn’t stop with the scarf.

Next, she reached into her purse and pulled out a pair of sunglasses.

She told us she was lucky to get such a good deal on her new prescription driving sunglasses.