(Our Coffee Klatch Kvetching Corner
that will
make half-Lutheran Sons Howl)
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"Obnoxious",
Mom would utter with great obviousness, raising her eyebrows and holding up the laminated
piece of red construction paper like a child therapist. It was driven into my
skull like a flutter of bats of exactly what I didn't want to hear, a
point as shrill as an ice-pick. . . . . gooey Pavlovian conditioning that drove
me mad as I'd bury my
head into my folded arms and sniggle "like the dickens".
That was her ineffective way of reading me "the riot act", like the concept of "The Swear Jar" that if I kept cursing "a blue streak" with an accumulation of nickels and quarters and dimes we'd get to order pizza. The incentive system was twisted beyond recognition when you'd deliberately start cursing in case you were hungry that night and wanted "to tip the basket" in your greedy favor with a gruesome smile on your face.
Her lectures on "thrift & savings" made about as much sense as whatever she did in her private practice, such as counsel people-- holding their hands and gradually getting around to telling them the psychologically-obvious for $150/hour over 50 sessions, when their fragile egos could finally "take it". Truth did not come in blows under my Mom's influence, and we boys never really quite grasped the value of money-- nor the hardness of truth. That is, when you could always "shake the money tree" and mortgage future Christmas or birthday checks from either her or the rich Jewish relatives up in New York and escape the bonds of servitude for yet another day.
Grandma & Grandpa
-- "Oh, Hi-- I just want to make sure that the children are taken care of!"
-- "Feh! They outta major in math & science like me! Anyone can be artsy-fartsy!"
Contractors came and went constantly, always tinkering around with our house that Mom saw as "an art project". Painters, roofers, landscapers as we children stayed inside-- powerless when she turned our house into a pink & purple candy-striped monstrosity. She'd protest that people would stop and take pictures of the house in the rain because it was so beautiful but I thought it was reporters from "The National Enquirer" doing exposés on daffy women all over the country.
Yet she'd preach a code of withered self-abnegation over the most stupid things.
There she would sit in a restaurant, her eyes traveling around with a vague, antsy smile on her face and compulsively twisting around a napkin. She was the stuff of bagels and cottage cheese blintzs and "kibbitzing" with her New Age meditation circle, smearing on extra jam when she thought no one was looking. Calories don't count when there's no second observer. . . . . as she'd "foo-foo" the notion of getting a second "Sprite" when you felt as if you were about to puke your guts out because you put too much syrup on your pancakes.
"Here. Drink water!"
And you'd keep saying it as soberly and with as much seriousness as possible and still she wouldn't listen.
We had a similar "battle of wills" over the computer in our household. At some point in the early '90s, she finally picked up an "Apple Macintosh" because it's what the schools were using. And that's why she bought a computer-- for school, right? Notwithstanding the fact that the world, even back then, was dominated by Microsoft IBM clones.
"I've done my research", she'd say with that snappy New Jersey chutzpath.
She had made her financial commitment, and we were supposed to be sitting contentedly with what we had like New Age fuddy-duddies with dildos up our asses. My mother was fond of the charity where you gave women in the Third World tiny loans for a sowing machine so they could start up little businesses and feed their families. But what if the sowing machine was defective and that's what you were left with, squatting in an overheated tin shack?
She bought our computer **pre-owned** from some mysterious warehouse out in Sunnyvale, California. Within a year or two, the problem began with the monitor-- it had a way of vertically widening and narrowing at will, like "little machine elves" were inside fidgeting with secret knobs. When we called the 1-800-SOS-APPLE hotline, they had never heard of such a thing. They asked for the monitor's serial number, and there was none. Befuddled, they told us to go fuck ourselves and not to make prank calls.
Then the computer stopped working one day. The repair man opened it up, and actually saw foreign mold growing in the circuit board. He had never seen anything like it either, and thought we were "putting him on". When my mother called up the mysterious warehouse out in Sunnyvale, California, it turned out that they no longer existed-- that they packed up and vanished. The ghosts of an overseas Chinese pirate operation couldn't have left us with fewer answers. . . . . our Midwestern household being taken over by southeast Asian jungle rot.
Back to the warehouses. . . . .
I don't think it really ever occurred to her what we were struggling with until she wanted to look for cheap airline tickets on "Priceline", and saw how slow the computer processed information. Only when bargain-hunting interfered with her "bargain with the devil" that she handed down to her boys would she budge, and only then would it be two years later when she bought us a brand new computer and felt that she could finally rest on her laurels as a parent.
But it was a Macintosh.
The final straw was when she laid down $4000 for an ugly, snot-green statue of a spindly woman growing out of a tree branch "because she needed beauty in her life". Dad stopped by, looked through the sliding glass doors, and went "Good Lord".
This was when my mother was feeling the bulge of middle age and was getting into her health kick. She picked up this bottle of saline solution from the health food store for $15, derived from salt that had been harvested all the way from the Utah salt flats, and regarded it like Kabbalah holy water because it had micro-minerals and a fancy label with a wavy graph. The dose was supposed to be one tiny teaspoon stirred into your protein shake. I reasoned on the morning of the statue's unveiling that since I was a big kid, I needed more. My mother saw me, began to panic, and there we were-- squabbling like Jews in a lower East Side tenement with much hand-wringing and screaming.
Dad had to pull her aside and tell her that it was basically road salt you spread on your driveway during wintertime, and you could get three 50 pound bags for $15 at Builder's Square. For once in the marriage, or even the post-marriage, my father was lecturing my mother on thrift.
After that, she couldn't really tell me anything.
I've come to see the analogy of the crane and rhinoceros. What is true for this crane-- an agile, silly bird-- is not true for a heavy land mammal. A crane can walk through the water without making a disturbance while a rhino will make big waves. A crane has wings and is light, and can kind of "hop around" while a rhino is "more grounded" by the laws of gravity and can't jump to save it's life. A crane falls for simple-minded tricks over and over, because it's brain is small while a rhinoceros is somewhat more intelligent but it's problem is anger and stubbornness. So oftentimes, they both fall into the same dynamic of fooling themselves and getting caught in traps but for different reasons.
Just how this rhinoceros sprang from the loins of a crane, I shall never fathom. . . . . but as long as she doesn't peck on me I'll keep her around.
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"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
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(Rheeee of Crickets)
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("I heard that, Missy!")
© 2008 by Insufferable Industries
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