Reading: Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword

Moving: Rode 13 miles, walked 3.6, swam a little

Viewing: a taped Sunday night's worth of television plus "That '70s Show"

15 May 2000: Flights of possession

Saturday night we had supper with SPM and JJM at Pints, a faux British pub near the art museum. SPM invited RDC fishing the next day, and RDC demurred because of this and that but I, ever the slacker, said go, go, because he never goes and he always misses it. So he went. Not knowing when he'd be back, I set up the VCR to tape Sunday night television for him , and it's a good thing I did because on the way to SPM's to pick him up in the evening, KBCO advertised a re-run of Saturday Night Live's 25th anniversary show, which I missed back in October. When both of us got home, we'd missed the first 30 minutes: did they mention fake commercials then ?

Anyway, SNL has sucked for ten years or more. If RDC thinks our generation deserves a cultural credit for having had to grow up in the '80s (a sentiment that, music-wise, I don't share), I think it sucks that I didn't know about SNL until well into high school by which time John Belushi was dead.

Confession time: in honor of my most ladylike and modulated laugh, my freshling across-the-hall neighbors called me Lisa Lupner. I had no idea who they meant. "Are you really so much younger than us?" they asked; they were juniors. It wasn't the two years but the fact that I wasn't allowed to stay up past 10:00 that kept me ignorant, that and a lack of cable for reruns. So. I never knew--still not having watched a lot of reruns, because few date from the '70s anyway--that Bill Murray's character's name in that skit was Todd. Because of my Obsessed Todds, that amuses me overmuch.

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RDC had a really good time fishing and I'm glad he went. He caught (and released, natch: love 'em and leave 'em) four, SPM four, and Ken four; but Alexander caught twelve. I asked if Alexander was a shadow-caster, a term I remember from A River Runs through It. I don't remember the younger brother's name and of course that book is packed. RDC works so much that I think it critical he play hooky sometimes. Next time I'll set him up with Mr. Darcy and Uncle Gardiner. (Last week I rented the far inferior 1979 BBC version of "Pride and Prejudice" because my BB never has the 1995 one with Jennifer Ehle (?) and Colin Firth. It sucked; I only wanted background noise while packing and it still sucked. So I reread the book again last week to rinse the bad taste from my brain. I'm hopeless and I don't mind.)

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Email from Nisou today! She got my care package, hooray! which I mailed I think in February. Maybe March. But still. Anyway, way back then, on the package I began to write my mother's address for the return. I stopped abruptly and wrote elsewhere, "Sorry, momentarily possessed." Nisou said yes I must be possessed and she really worried at her first glimpse of it: why would I be in Old Lyme?

Nisou has a healthy fear of my mother, I think, as have most of my acquaintance. My mother would say I have prejudiced every one of them against her before they ever met her, which is quite possibly true, but she doesn't exactly do anything when you meet her in person to counteract that presupposition.

I might not have mentioned her to RDC much at all, being slightly more mature at 24, when I got to know him, than I was at 18, when I met the bulk of my lifelong college friends. Hmm, but maybe I had, because ABW and I were deep into our ongoing "My Mother Is Crazier Than Yours" competition at that point.

The first time RDC met my mother, we came to the house to shower and change. We'd spent the day at my lake and were going out to dinner and a play. So I introduced them: Mom, this is RDC; Rich, this is my mother B."

"Cacka-valley," my mother stammered, taking in his tanned, Mediterranean complexion and suspiciously large nose. "What kind of a name is that, dear?"

I don't recall when Nisou first met my mother (probably the summer after freshling year), but she well knew how I felt about her when I came home for a week in 1996, for the first time since moving to Denver a full year before. Nisou was getting married, and she had done everything for me the year before when I got married, and I planned to be at her beck and call from Wednesday of my week onward.

Thursday my duty was no more onerous than to escort to Mystic Seaport four Frenchies: SPG's parents and DEDB's French foster parents. Jackie spoke English well, her husband a little less, and SPG's parents could basically say yes and no. DEDB wanted them to have a taste of New England, and while she prefers Sturbridge Village, Mystic presumably would be slightly cooler, since it's on the shore instead of 70 miles inland. So I drove (the one and only time I have been near the casino in Ledyard) and was tour guide, and the day was only occasionally awkward (like at lunch time: how do you explain cheap greasy tourist food to a French gourmand?).

In the evening, we all gathered on the deck at Charenton (for a much better meal): Nisou and her parents, SPG and his parents, Jackie and Michel, DEDB's sister ALB and her then-boyfriend-now-husband Michael, maybe the two Beasts, and my friend ABW with her son. (I had left my sandals in her car when she picked me up from the airport and she was now delivering them.) It was such a pleasant evening, with good conversation (in two languages), good food, good friends. Even ABW, who knows German because she's never forgiven the French for William the Conqueror (although she's studied Old Norse), nursed AKW congenially in the background.

We laid plans for the next day, the day before the weddding. The dance floor was to be finished, streamers hung, tents erected, and people fed, and guests would be arriving. Nisou asked, "Lisa, are you going to be here tomorrow or do you have other plans?"

I replied reflexively, "No, of course not, I can't; I'm spending the day with my mother."

Immediate, raucous laughter ensued. From Nisou and her mother and Mrs. Beast and ABW, because they knew how I feel about her; and then from the other English speakers, because the sentiment was obvious enough; and then in the hubbub, someone translating and then gasps of comprehension, followed by chortles.

The day after the wedding, my mother came to fetch me from the Beasts, where I had been staying. I asked if we could please skedaddle over to Charenton, because I'd forgotten to bring my presents the day before. My mother acquiesced. We arrived, and my mother wanted me just to quick nip in, or maybe just throw the boxes out the car window. I asked her please to come in and say hi, to give my bestest friend her congratulations upon getting married, to say hello to her family who had, let's not forget, hosted my own wedding the year before. My mother grudgingly agreed.

In the house, I re-introduced my mother to Nisou's. BJW tried to meet-and-street herself and me, because we had to get back to Old Lyme so I could clear my crap out of her house. JUMB, being effortlessly much more gracious than I shall ever be even with great effort (effortlessness being the point of grace), overrode that and said that while she well understands wanting offspring's detritus out of the house, we had to stay for breakfast. Which was fine with me.

I didn't try to introduce BJW to everyone, just the principal players and not the other guests emerging from pallets and crowded bedrooms and tents on the lawn. I could feel my mother getting overwhelmed at the number of people.

The Charenton family she knew and should have remembered, as well as two other of my college friends; the only brand-new people decorum dictated she should meet and congratulate were the groom's parents. I found Eliane. I don't know which woman was older; I introduced my mother to Eliane first because my mother and I know each other and Eliane could have been presumed to be at a loss.

"Eliane, c'est ma mere, B. Mom, this is SPG's mother, Eliane."

Eliane knew of my mother only the unkind comment I'd made Thursday night. She looked with surprise from my face to hers, possibly only to detect our resemblance (which is marked). "Ah, hello," she began, at which pointed our shared vocabularies faltered. Smiles were produced, possibly forced, and congratulations clumsily issued by BJWL were clumsily translated by me.

When JUMB soon called "À table!" my mother felt more comfortable. At table, under the tents, I introduced her to Aunt Betty who asked please to be called Elizabeth. I apologized: I only knew her name because of how family members long acquainted with her addressed her. She explained about wanting to shed that generational marker of a name, of which my mother's is another. So they chatted and that was fine; the general topic was travel plans as guests scattered to the four winds. I myself would fly back to Denver that evening.

When we left (we'd spent, perhaps, 30 minutes altogether), my mother, bless her, did try to be pleasant. She probably thanked JUMB for her second breakfast. (She'd picked me up from the Beasts at 8:00, which was fine because I appreciated the ride whatever its time, and which meant she left Old Lyme at 7:00, yet still this was her second breakfast. Which is why 8:00 doesn't seem an unreasonable hour to her to pick someone up.) She probably said goodbye to Aunt Elizabeth and Nisou's father and sister. Then she approached Eliane.

Pitching her voice even louder and more shrill than her usual, in order that the non-English speaker would be certain to comprehend her, she screeched, "I hope you enjoy," flapping her arms energetically, "your flight!"

My poor mother. I am torn between how comic and pitiful that attempt was, and my appreciation that she made the attempt at all.

The year before, after my wedding, RDC's boss asked him if my mother was hard of hearing. Well, yes, RDC said, but why? The boss had wondered because my mother spoke so very loudly to her. Well, yes, she is, confirmed RDC, at least selectively, but she's in denial.

So RDC came home and reported that to me.

"RDC, it's not because BJW's deaf that she spoke to your boss so loudly. It's because your boss is Bengali and speaks English with an accent and wore a sari and therefore clearly doesn't understand English spoken in moderate tone."

Never mind that Dipa's accent is the regional accent of a native English speaker from an Anglophone country: her skin and attire proved her to be a non-native speaker however much her fluency proved her a native one.

On the other hand, my mother didn't ignore Dipa altogether as an illegal alien clamoring for our shores and stealing Murkan jobs. So I shouldn't mock her.

But I do.

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And I do even though my mother has worked so hard and deprived herself all her life (but she might enjoy the martyrdom). Speaking of playing hooky, one college summer when I still lived at home, my mother had been taking an evening math class at Mitchell (a community college or low-level four-year). I came home from work via the beach one evening to find her fidgeting on the couch with her textbook. She told me she had a test the next day but her cousin Joan, with whom she had always been close, was visiting her parents in Kensington, an hour away. Joan had moved to Wyoming many years before and hadn't been back since. Joan wanted her to come up and go for a swim in my great-aunt's pool, spend the evening, chat. My mother was well and truly torn. She loved her cousin, she missed her cousin, but duty called her to her studies.

Isn't that sad?

"Ma," I protested, "you've been working hard at this class all summer, right? Doing well? How well are you going to do on the test when you know you've missed your only chance to see Joan for years? You're going to resent the course, or I would. Go. Giggle with Joan. I bet you'll be in such a fine state of mind that tomorrow night you could ace a test in differential calculus." Or words to that effect.

She went. She had a great time. She aced her test. Of course.

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And this week's was one of the funniest "X-Files" ever. Because I'd taped it, RDC rewound to watch the biker flip over the naked dead body about twelve times. And Leslie wished Alson could talk. I was howling with laughter.