Tuesday,
August 23, 2011
Dear
Kathy, Suzy, and Jonathan~
You may remember that Mom dismissed
me last Friday after an audience of one minute because she was ready to take a
nap. She told me to come back Friday.
I knew it wasn’t yet Friday
(tomorrow’s Wednesday; yesterday was Monday, and Obama’s president), but I went
anyway and prepared Carol at the reception desk to let me out shortly, but Mom
and I wound up spending a very enjoyable 1 hour and 15 minutes together! Kay
was there but at her best—sound asleep—and Mom was lying on her (Mom’s) bed
with her eyes closed but either talking in her sleep or continuing a
conversation with Kay when she thought Kay was awake or not deaf. I heard what Mom said, but I can’t remember
what the first two sentences were. I
know the third was, “The cigarettes…just look in every cubicle. You’ll find them.”
I wasn’t sure whether I should wake
her up to be told to leave or just let her sleep, but after a couple of minutes
(2x as long as Friday!), she opened her eyes and said, “Oh! I’m happy to see you!” She said, “I haven’t see you for a while,
but I don’t hold that against you.”
I told her that she’d asked me to
leave last Friday after I’d been there a minute, and she was really surprised
she’d said such a thing.
I asked whether she’d like to go out
into the garden or leave the room to go somewhere else, but she said she just
wanted to lie there, so I lay down beside her, and we had a nice little
conversation while she stroked my arm, which she said felt good.
She asked me what I was up to, and I told her
about my courses—a little bit—and said I’d been in touch with some friends from
the South because we were discussing “The Help.” Mom
and I talked a little bit about the South.
At first she didn’t remember Arlene, the “colored” woman who came to
iron once a week, but she remembered other things. She just couldn’t believe we were there after
the Supreme Court decision to integrate (Brown vs. Board of Education, 1954),
and she was right that there was no sign any such law had ever been passed
where we went to school. I told her we’d
been there from 1956 to 1964.
Then I offered her a lemon cookie,
and she took a bite and gave the rest back to me but said she’d try the other
one, which was the same kind exactly. “I
think the round ones are better,” she said, eating the second twin.
I brought out The Funny Times, which I hoped would be a nice change from Unlikely Friends (though’ I’m not tired of that). I always start with the Harper’s Index, and
I thought that if I used sentences instead of fragments, she might be able to
follow it. (And what is this, Jonathan,
Economics major: The U.S. labor
productivity has increased 114% since 1972, but the U.S. labor wages have
decreased 6%? Can that be true?)
Mom guessed 1000 for the number of man-made
objects orbiting Earth, and that sounded reasonable to me, but it’s 22,000 in
case you’d like to take a look.
Mother asked, “Do you think you
sometimes see them when you think you’re seeing something else?”
I
told her that, well, those couldn’t all be stars!
I decided to skip the statistics about
the confirmed number of terrorist plots against the United States perpetrated
by Muslins last year, but just so you know, there were 10. There were 25 by non-Muslims. (Last year was the deadliest year for Afghan
civilians since the US invaded in 2001, and the CIA drone attacks killed 607
people in Pakistan last year. You don’t
even want to know the number of the ten most popular prime-time television
dramas that regularly feature corpses.)
We read Garrison Keillor’s “A Parent’s
Prayer,” and while we were on religion we looked at the updated Bible stories
contest, but I had to explain about Facebook before she thought the winning
entry was funny:
“My God, my God! Why have you unfriended me?” (Jonathan, you weren’t brought up properly,
or you’d know the original.)
Mom liked, “And for 40 years the mothers
told their children, ‘Yes, it’s manna for dinner AGAIN.’”
I liked “An iPhone for an iPhone” more
than Mom did, but she explained “No schtupping on the side” to me. (I don’t think she got it quite right.) The last thing we read was “Curmudgeon,” all
about Democracy. (“What gives every man
the right to be his own oppressor….)
Mom talked a little bit about her 90th
birthday, which she still says is on Halloween, and she still wants to be a
witch, and when I asked her why, she said, “To show that not all witches are
bitches.” She said she’d like me to get
her an iPod, and I told her we could try it out and see how she liked it, which
we can. I doubt that it will work, but
who knows! She remembered that my
birthday was November 15.
So, she was in a really good
emotional and mental state, and it was a very quiet, pleasant peaceful hour and
a quarter!
I started to wish you all a good
weekend, but I went back before Friday, didn’t I!
Love,
Tina
Oh,
I almost forgot that Mom seemed puzzled about how I got in.
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