Deciding what to do today is proving rather difficult.
My aunt Helen and uncle Burns (my mother’s younger brother) want to see me before pulling out to visit their son, my cousin Scott, a US Marine, in North Carolina.
I ask my mother how she wants to play it. She cannot answer because Helen has already made known what SHE wants to do. My mother is stricken by such situations, and what she wants to do is a consideration she seems genetically unable to entertain.
Helen would like us to come out to dinner. My mother has told Helen to keep it simple, meaning don’t go to so much trouble, meaning don’t spend your money on me, I’ll feel guilty for it. I’m jumping up and down saying “Take me to dinner! Take me to dinner!”
My mother suggests everyone come to hers. Kathy, Jim, Tiffany and Billy will all be coming out after their various work shifts and it would be easier to make a bit of food and spend a little time here. Helen concedes and nearly begs my mother to bring the dessert. Mom allows this, and everything seems settled.
My mother puts the phone down and issues one of her bone-chilling sighs, indicating, as they do, her great displeasure in something.
Not even a competent deity can tell you exactly what it is she’s not happy about, however. I foolishly attempt to adhere to rational thought: “Isn’t this what you wanted? For them to come here?”
“No,” my mother says in a voice that suggests I should already know this, “What I’d really like to do is just sit on my ass at home and do nothing tonight!”
As always, it’s way too late to do anything about turning anything around. I should be used to this, but it still stumps me. Every adult is accountable for themselves and seeing to the manifestation of their desires. If they don’t get what they want, the vast majority of the time it is their own damned fault. I almost pity my mother for her apparently inborn predisposition to bow to the desires of everyone else on earth before the possibility of tending to her own dares to flicker in her mind’s light. I really wish, once in a while at least, that she'd think about herself first.
At 6pm, the doorbell goes. The Camerons have arrived.
I like Burns and Helen. They’re smart, hilarious and generally light-hearted people. They’ve done some traveling and know how to enjoy a good thing in life now and then. But there comes a moment somewhere in the evening when Helen’s apparently latent membership in the KKK snaps into ‘active’ status.
“I liked Scotland. That was nice. Very nice people. But in London, they’ve got them Indians and Pakistanis and lots of blacks.” I’m no longer baited by comments such as these. I prefer to let them go because I can do nothing other than become frustrated. I only say that the favourite food in the UK is chicken tikka masala, a dish brought to the UK population by Indians. Just like that, the conversation shifts again, and we’re onto more innocuous subjects as though nothing had happened.
We eat turkey burgers, the rare handful of crudités, beer, wine, coffee, pie and cake. They’ll be traveling with my cousin Carla and two hounds: one blood, one Bassett, in a four-seater all the way to the southeast coast. After a bit of parting banter, they’re up and out. They’re leaving in the morning and haven’t started to pack. They may have a thing racist streak in them, but they’re spontaneous and daring more than anything else – and in their 60s. I’m happy to see there is some of this spirit still lurking in a corner of my ancestry and wish them and the dogs happy trails.
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