When Old Meets New – Musings on Living With An Ancient Vampire

Not only do we have 31 year old Cody, a “New Vampire in Training” staying our house now, but Great Great Great Great Grandmamma Lola is now staying with us as well.

Right now Lola is sitting by a window in a large comfy chair, sitting on one leg, and as always, she has some sort of book in her hand. The photo I’ve shared is of Lola around 1900. She still looks the same except she now wears eye makeup, blush and lip gloss, and her clothes are modern. She wears jeans and a cute whispy olive green sleeveless shirt she got when shopping with Clara over the weekend. Her chestnut colored hair falls in curls down her back. Her arms are bare, but full of silver bangles. Her fingernails are painted a slate blue, like the color of the ocean on a stormy day. Her feet are bare with the same blue on her toenails. As always Lola looks as if she has just walked out of the pages of a fashions magazine (a trait I failed to get from her). She looks calm and peaceful. Which Lola is when not compelled to be otherwise.

Lola, who looks not a day over 30, is over 1,000 year old.  A few years ago she had a nasty run in with Vampire Hunters and has been slow in healing from her physical injuries and injuries to her spirit. Complications made it necessary for her to be with others for a while, mostly in the company of other so she won’t turn into a hermit. Plus being with grandchildren, especially teens will do her well.

Of course Cody, the recent Vampire convert, is enchanted by her. That could be dangerous in so many ways, but then again there is a lot he could learn from her. The kids are starting to make Harold & Maude jokes. Sorry, I should have told them to stop but it is sort of funny.

Old Vampires tend to be like cats. They lie. They lie – a lot. It is from long centuries of living in fear and reinvention. Well, that could be true for some of them. For others the lies are more like sport. Lies are fun. Lies are self preservation. Lies get you love and passion and more important – lies get you dinner.

Which brings up and issue about telling lies to OTHER Vampires. I can see why a Vampire would distort the truth to regular humans, but there is no reason to lie to another Vampire.

But my teens think their ancient Grandmamma Lola is cute. They think most really ancient Vampires are cute due to their old-fashioned ways and often quaint way of talking.

The ancient vampires are cunning and could charm the skin off a rattlesnake, but I do worry about them. Like all “living” things, or most living things, they are fragile in their old age. Some ancients, due to isolation are not in touch with the modern world. Others have physical or mental problems that come from years of trauma from physical elements or violence or on rare occasions or illness. And some of them are just plain nuts (it happens).

On the other hand, I worry more about regular humans who cross their paths.

Grandmamma Lola claims a lot of things. Some true, some maybe true, some questionable and some hard to believe.

She told my mother that Shakespeare wrote Sonnet 116 for her that if he had not been a regular human she might have had his love child had he not been so annoying. She also claimed that there was a good chance that he HAD been turned into a Vampire and changed his name. Next thing you know she’d tell us all that he came back into the light as Nicolai Tesla or David Lee Roth.  Lola was full of stories (and often full of shit but that’s ok, she has a good excuse).

Lola also spends time telling my teens and their friends, Cody, and the rest of us about more or less the history of modern civilization – which is not all that civilized. She watches word events with great sadness wondering “why” is this still going on after all these years. “It is insane” she’ll say in her old language and odd accent that she uses when she is musing about anything that upsets her.  Today, upon hearing the news from Libya she was especially sad and uneasy. “Senseless acts that only harm good people” she says. “Thousands of times a day good people are harmed, their spirits broken, their lives shattered or taken…and it never makes sense.” It is easy for us (Vampires) to detach from the world of regular humans but it takes an ancient Vampire like Lola to bring us back and let us know that being isolated will only hurt, not help us.

Lola tells the children that the most dangerous weapon a group or government can have is “IGNORANCE”. If one keeps people in ignorance then those people can be kept under control and made to do just about anything. Ignorance is like a cage and a whip – it will only bring fear and harm.

We’re enjoying our evenings with Lola and Cody around. In the whirlwind rush of teen life – sports, homework, friends, activities – they add to the mix, like a wonderful abstract painting or one of Teddy’s cocktails.
So tonight we’ll settle in, and after homework we’ll watch the finals of ATG with the kids, then go out to the deck to watch the bats and chat. Teddy and I will plan the hunts for the weekend. Lola will train Cody on the finer points of Vampire paranormal behavior. And we’ll pry the kids away from their iPods and Androids and Skype and kiss them goodnight.

Life is good. And your homework assignment is to call your parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles or any special elders in your life and let them know how you value them and how much you love them.

~ Juliette aka Vampire Maman

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Ignorance is our enemy.