Plantinga's totally depraved grandmother

This is an excerpt from Plantinga's essay, "A Christian Life Partly Lived," from Kelly Clark ed. Philosophers Who Believe: The Spiritual Journeys of 11 Leading Thinkers.

What was preached was, of course, historic Calvinism. When I was eight or nine I began to understand and think seroiusly about the so-called five points of Calvinism enshrined in the TULIP acronym: Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace and Perseverance of the Saints. I remember wondering in particular about total depravity. I do indeed subscribe to that doctrine, which, as I understand it, quite properly points out that for most or all of us, every important area of our lives is distorted and compromised by sin. When I first began to think about it, however, I took it to mean that everyone was completely wicked, wholly bad, no better than a Hitler or a Judas. That seemed to me a bit confusing and hard to credit; was my grandmother (in fact, a very saintly woman) really completely wicked? Was there nothing good about her at all. That seemed a bit too much. True, I had heard her say "Shit" a couple of times: once when someone came stomping into the kitchen, and one when I threw a string of fire-crackers into the fifty-gallon drum in which she was curing dried beef (they began exploding in rapid-fire succession just as she came to look into the drum). But what sthat really enough to make her a moral monster, particularly when so much about her pointed in the opposite direction?

See also this discussion in on John DePoe's blog.