Reading: Edward Eager, Magic or Not? and The Well-Wishers

Christmas: REI

Learning: self-restraint

Moving: 3.6 mile walk

Viewing: Magpies. "Antz"

11 December 1999: Shopping

Saturday morning, 8:04 am. Blake has an 8:30 appointment at the vet. The phone rings. BJWL. As usual she asks if this is a good time to call, though I don't know why she wastes her time asking that since it doesn't affect her calling behavior. "No, it's not, because I was just walking out the door to go to the vet."
"Oh well I wasn't calling to chitchat but..."
I had a few minutes before I had to leave and she was calling about Christmas presents for me (and RDC) since she alleges she has not received the letter I sent her over a week ago with exact descriptions and what not. I can do this in 40 seconds, I told myself. I told her 100 Denier black medium tights from Express.
"Second choice?"
"There is none." I wonder if she'll invent one.
"Okay, but what else?"
"Victoria's Secret black thigh highs large, no back seam."
"Do you wear a garter?"
"NO. They use elastic. Ma, I have to go to the vet."
No letter meant no carefully compiled info from REI either. "What about Rich?"
"Ma, I have to go to REI's web site and find the specs and phone number and call you back."
"Ree?"
"No, ma, are eee eye. Ma, I have to go to the vet."
"R Y Y?"
"No, ma, it stands for Recreational Equipment Incorporated: REI. Are eee eye. Forget it, ma, I'd have to look all that up again and I have to go to the vet. I will call you later today but right now I am hanging up because I have to go to the vet."

The vet says that Blake would have been a snake's lunch by now if he were in the wild. Isn't that a fine how-d'you-do. When he said that I gathered my buddy in my palms and cuddled him against my cheek. He's right, though. Blake doesn't shed his feather symmetrically and wouldn't fly straight or strong and therefore would be a snake's lunch by now. What feathers he does grow are good, he just doesn't shed them. Overall, he's fine.

"What? He's going blind?" (This is later in the day.)
"No, ma, he's okay. I said he's fine."

In the meantime RDC and I had looked up just what he wanted at REI.
"Your mother's not going to want to spend $23 on a pair of socks."
"My mother wants to spend something on you and this is within her budget and something you want and she can huff at the prices at a distance." All the addresses and phone numbers for places we'd like donations to, like Audobon and The Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, as stand-ins for the "what is that owl? white?" Protection Society, nestle alongside REI Smartwool Trek Sock stock info somewhere in a Dead Letter Office. Maybe Santa'll get 'em.

So I told her the sock info. I started with an 800 phone number.
"Is that toll free?"
" Ma, it's an 800 number." Then I gave her the item number.
"What's that XX xxxxx mean?"
"It's the item number, just like in every other catalog ever."
I told her the size, color, and price. "If you're feeling generous, RDC says he could use two pair."

She cannot possibly buy acrylic cable-knit knee-high socks, can she? She wanted to know still more. I looked around and my gaze fell on the dining table. "Four cloth [RDC interjected "cotton!"] cotton table napkins, blue. Periwinkle or navy."
"Napkins?" (She writes laboriously. Someone at work the other day was writing down something I was saying and I could tell they wrote January instead of 1/ and you might as well flay my skin from my bones with a currying brush. Could you waste less of my time, please, and write it out nice and pretty in your final draft?) She continued, "periwinkle--or what was the other?"

Finally all of this was accomplished and she asked, "So how's RDC's job?" She has never asked about his job before. This might be because, although I told her about the job in January when he got it, she believed up to the day of Roxanne's wedding when I nearly put mascara in not on my eye that his job was only part time, since the part-time idea supports her ongoing though unsubstantiated theory that I am an abused spouse. Or perhaps CLH had dropped a hint against my explicit request, as she did with Dad (we forbade her only from telling BJWL, but she didn't extrapolate the broader concept of "parents" from that).

The hint CLH might have dropped is the subject I've been studiously skirting for the past month until a decision. The day we left for Connecticut, DU had had a conference. Someone offered RDC a job, as happens at almost every professional or academic conference or gathering he attends. This time, unlike previously, he was seriously tempted. This time, after some thought and advice and conferring, not only between us and with his academic adviser at DU and Denver friends but also with our wise family of friends in Connecticut, he took it. His last day at DU is early in January, and he is going to Boston Wednesday to meet several of the company and attend its Christmas party (I would have gone but I've alloted all my vacation hours elsewhere).

So. I told my mother, "Well actually RDC has a different job." I didn't tell her that this company desired him for his unique combination of academic and technological talents, that it will delay but not stop his dissertation, or any of the aspects of the company or the job that tempted my husband and whose challenges he merrily anticipates tackling. I told her what she could put a handle on: the name of the company, a specific duty of the position, and the fact that it should enable us to buy a house in the coming year. I did not tell her that the night he decided, I applied for an application to CU Denver for the master's program in English. I didn't tell her about the signing bonus or the probable second car or the new vacuum cleaner or the please please please digital camera in our near future. She could understand house and she can understand a definable task, if not theoretical development, but the name of the company was just about the limit.

I told her it has to do with the web, "you know, the world wide web," and told her the name (I'm not sure yet if I'm allowed to tell), which includes two letters. The frustration of explaining REI earlier in the day had sapped my patience. I made sure to tell her what the letters stood for before I pronounced the words' initials but still was tempted to drive my skull through the sheetrock in the hallway before she was able to repeat the name to me correctly. Not that she'll remember in two days anyway.

This was one of those occasions I used what my sister calls my Calm Voice.