Reading: Alison Weir, Eleanor of Aquitaine

Moving: No.

Viewing: Gorgeous day.

Listening: KBCO

3 March 2000: Setting Nisou straight

Confidential to Andrew S.: AOL really pisses me off.

DEDBG actually asked me all by herself, "How's BJWL? You haven't said anything about her lately--have you finally learned to deal with her?"

Well, Nisou my pet, see I have this on-line journal and I don't bitch you to as much to it anymore but to answer your question, no I haven't.

I sent my mother not much of a letter recently. I was looking at Amy's page, which I cannot find just now, for her chickens about To Kill a Mockingbird, and checked the glosses. One led to a recipe that I thought BJWL would like, or, if she wouldn't make the dish or like it, she at least would understand why I sent it to her. The site (not Amy's) was called "From the Grits Kitchen" and I said that if she didn't make it, its being "from the grits kitchen" was reason enough not to. She understood my little notveryfunny about Francoma pottery, so I thought she might like that. Plus I printed out the terraserver photographs of our road.

No response so far, not even a phone call, "Hi dear, that was very funny, except I didn't get it, but I sure do appreciate the fact that you try to communicate with these personal interest stories." Like her squirrel, I guess. (I called her to say it was cute.)

I shouldn't have any problem with her not responding to my challenging letters about Issues when she so patently has nothing to say to me about my lighthearted little morsels. I have, though, of course.

Also I sent her (and Granny and Dad) one of the wallet-sized Glamour Shots. The fur stole one came in wallet size. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with the others. DMB sent me a big honkin' crystal 8.5x11" frame for the gown one. RDC told her we don't have the horizontal space for it and she told him to hang it on the wall but a) I'd never put an 8.5x11" picture of myself on the wall as decoration and b) I'd be afraid the frame would one day fall and crash and hit some antipodean person on the foot. I should send all the pictures back to her. She and JJT took two wallet pictures for themselves and gave me the rest, but I don't want them. If the proofs are enough proof of what a disaster it all was, why do I distribute the prints? I don't know; because my mother likes formal poses?

Which leads me back to my original point (in the first paragraph, that was): issues I have with my mother.

Speaking of photography: my sister was a bridesmaid in 1989 and my parents and I were invited to the wedding as well. After the ceremony, CLH and I posed on the church steps, she in her royal blue prom gown and I in my stylin' new outfit (recently purchased for a job interview and the first such I had ever owned) and both of us in sunglasses. We were laughing and ourselves and BJWL did take (if reluctantly) of picture of that (why don't I have a copy? I'll have to ask) but then she insisted she have a "nice" one, posed, without sunglasses, with "nice" smiles. We complied. We looked like the adult version of the personality-less meatbags she birthed, and that was the photograph she preferred to the one in which we looked like the individual people we'd become.

Speaking of weddings: I got a postcard (her primary means of communication) from CLH recently with this postscript: "Are you coming home for the nuptials?" One of BDL's daughters is getting married in April, and no I am not going home for it. Reasons: One, I will not enter Pastor Miami Vice's church for anything but two things: BDL's funeral, if it happens before my mother's (as it is, demographically speaking, likely to)--for her sake I would attend; and my mother's, which I would attend for my own and my sister's sakes. Two: airfare. Three: it would be chock-full of BDL's church folk, and they're not fun.

Four: This one isn't a reason but gets its own paragraph because it's its own issue. The man the German Shepherd is marrying isn't purely white. He's Latino. Of Spanish (Caucasian, but dark) and African descent because he's Puerto Rican. Maybe I shouldn't bold that, maybe I should shrink it as if I were whispering it because that's how my mother broached the topic. Two years ago, she told me that the Shepherd was seeing someone and BDL wasn't very happy because he was Puerto Rican (over the phone I heard her spine crack as she drew herself up tall in her stance of superior tolerance) "but we're not saying anything to her about it."

Another issue she wasn't saying anything about was weight, specifically the elder's. The day before she and BDL got married, the morning of the day we met the Shepherds, BJW told us, "Now, [the elder] has gained a lot of weight recently but you shouldn't say anything to her about it." What the hell were we going to say to a woman we'd never met before? "Jeez, you're even fatter than our mother whom you hate warned us! She told us not to say anything but you are so very fat I can't resist, and I must tell you, in case you hadn't noticed, that you're downright porky!"

Of course, my mother isn't the only person who carefully doesn't say anything about anything. My mother ran into a fellow Girl Scout Troop Survivor a while ago. The two immediate families had been friends when we four girls (all very close in age) were small and therefore more likely to get along and our parents (my and CLH's) still got along at all. It might in fact have been residual friendship with this family that made the name Lynchburg catch my mother's eye--the younger daughter attended. The two mothers hadn't seen each other for years, I'm sure, when they ran into each other at the A&P or somewhere like that in the fall of 1993. The other mother told BJW that her younger daughter was engaged. As she rooted in her purse for a picture, she said to my mother, "Please don't say anything." The photograph she produced featured the daughter with the fiancé--who was (shh!) black.

Now that I think about it, maybe my mother asks us not to say hurtful things because she herself needs to be asked not to say hurtful things.

Not that I'll ever win any prizes for diplomacy or tact myself (PLT clears his throat). But when presented with a picture of an interracial couple, I wouldn't exclaim to either one's parent, "Oh you poor thing, you'll never be able to love your grandchildren." Nor think it, I should clarify.

"He believes, as I do, that interracial marriage is wrong, but he's not a racist." If my S.O. Litmus tests for pro-choice dog-loving Macinphileness, my Litmus for her S.O. was "Is he racist?" I asked this perhaps tactless question because she had already told me he'd got her listening to Rush Limbaugh.

This she told me in May 1993, when she started going out with him (the Dittohead). It was December of 1993 when she told me about seeing the other mother. I remember the place and time clearly: Granny was driving, my mother was in the passenger seat, and I was in the back seat, and we were on the Mass Pike on the way to spend a Christmassy weekend with our sister/daughter/granddaughter in Boston, since I was going to Florida for the holiday. So she told me this, and then said "but I wasn't going to say anything; what would I have said?" (Oh I don't know, "Congratulations!" is the usual response when someone tells you her daughter's engaged.)

It'd been seven months since she said she didn't believe in interracial marriage, so I asked, "But you don't believe in interracial marriage."

"I never said that! Why would I say that?"

"Um, last May you said that you don't believe in interracial marriage when you told me that you and Dittohead aren't racists."

Then there was the time my parents together told me that miscegenation (exists at all and) is wrong because such "mixed" children don't belong one place or the other. Are there such places? And if there are, can't someone belong to both?

When both my grandparents lived with her, she forbade them to answer the phone when she wasn't home. See, they might get to the phone only after the answering machine picked up, and because they didn't know how to turn it off, the machine would record the entire conversation. (I'm going to use the Brit term I learned from Bridget Jones, answerphone.) This led to an anguishing scene once when I was home, in the living room with my grandparents, when my mother came home and began to play her messages at her usual "I'm not deaf" penetrating volume. My uncle's voice boomed through the house: "Ma? Dad? You home? Ma? Dad?" and my grandfather started up from his chair: "Is that JCW2?" and Granny told him, no, it's just the answerphone playing. Of course, this was but a repeat of a scene from earlier that day, when the actual call came but they were forbidden to pick it up and talk to their son.

She said the concept of an answerphone "blew their minds" but doesn't understand the concept of voicemail herself. So often the voicemail she leaves will ramble on and on and on: "If you're there, please pick up...Lisa, if you're there, pick up the phone." If I were screening calls (the only advantage over voicemail of an answerphone), would such a plea make me pick up?

She thinks I must be there, listening to her voice through the machine and snickering up my sleeve, when she calls because she calls at 6:30 in the morning. (On weekends she lets us sleep until 7:00 or maybe even 8:00.) I myself in principle don't mind people calling at that hour, as long as I land on the phone before the first ring's half over. RDC minds; he's still in bed. I mind in practice because she continues to call at that time despite my asking her not to. My reason for asking her not to is that RDC is still in bed; however since I am up and I am the one she wishes to talk to, she continues to call. Not often but occasionally I go online in the morning and, through that maternal precognition she has in abundance, she chooses those mornings to call. "Hi honey, it's Mom, pick up..."

My beloved sister didn't understand for a million years that we had voicemail either. All she knew is that she didn't always get a busy signal, and that made her happy. She figured we were out all the time, and that was better than RDC monopolizing the phone line (as if I don't spend a good chunk of time online myself). My father leaves messages for RDC since, security-wise, his is the voice speaking the greeting. "Hey Rich. This is Lisa's dad. Have her give me a call."

My family. I love them, they make me crazy, they crack me up. I have yet to finish my Glamour Shots letter to CLH and RRP. And Granny has moved into a skilled-care facility, so I need to write to her more often. She has her cat, a private bedroom with her own bathroom, and my old dorm fridge where she keeps fresh fruit and stuff, no BJWL, and no stairs, but she's not happy about it. I hope that's a matter of not happy yet and of adjustment.