Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

At some point during the trip, I got an idiotic text from my brother, whose texts generally have idiotic leanings. And are all caps, which when you are texting I would think would be more difficult. So I assume it was intentionally screaming, not incidental screaming (Thank you Mindy, for enlightening me to the faux pas in my early days of e-mail use).

Worse, I was expecting something cute, maybe from Scott, like a bunch of Xs and Os. It made the fact that it was an intrusive message of moronic quality from my brother (also of moronic quality on a good day) that much more aggravating.

It simply read, "HAVE YOU HEARD FROM MOM?"

I grimaced, but had to think for a second. I had not heard from Mom since I called her on the way home from work the same evening I'd had the stupid conversation with Lars about the amusement park trip in the hurricane. I'd heard they were evacuating coastal North Carolina and assumed she'd be on the road to Western Hayseed, and had nearly rolled my eyes to the point of injury (and car accident) at the long and overly emphatic explanation for her stubborn insistence on staying put.

I could have typed all that but I would have surely gotten mugged in DC doing so. Instead, I typed a dismissive "No." He'd rather text me than just call her himself. Oh right, the wife would hardly permit that.

I put it out of my head, forcibly. It would be just Mom's MO to sit in NC stewing and making a list of all the ungrateful people in her life that did not think to worry about her sufficiently to make a phone call to check on her. And cross them off the Christmas list. Oh, silly me. I am already off the Christmas list. Let her do some worrying. It's not like she was ringing my phone off its cradle checking to see if my house had finally and inevitably floated off its foundation to a new position on the map.

But a few nights later, as I sat watching a baseball game with Scott and eating ice cream straight from the carton with two spoons, she called me. Scott muted the TV and himself almost on cue.

I guess she got tired of us waiting to call her (or realized Hell might have to be well on its way to freezing over before I'd call her for anything not related to an obligatory holiday call or to report someone's untimely death, or to gloat that one of her least favorite people had gained 300 pounds and had been recently spotted eating a jumbo can of SPAM directly from the can with a fork while perusing the aisles at Big Lots for deals on bulk snack foods.)

Maybe Joe had read her the riot act about just vanishing in the storm a la Dorothy and Toto and she felt guilty? Probably not. I am not sure guilt is something Estelle entertains for long, and am fairly certain she does not suffer it more than a moment at a time before squashing it with self-righteous thoughts.

Anyway, I buckle my seatbelt for the lengthy rant. That Scott can hear even without consciously eavesdropping.

Seems Mom's high-falutin' Trac-fon went on the fritz mid-Irene. And she thought it might be the battery (please pronounce this word "bat-tree" with only two syllables as you read this to yourself in your head) because she had had "3 bars" just moments before the damn little thing went dead as a doornail. So one night after driving all over the Mighty South when they'd had no electricity and no A/C and "you know, Bill can't sleep like that" (Hello, he has emphysema and is 110 years old. Put a pillow over his face and call it a night, Estelle.) looking for a m0-tel, and by the way, not finding one, the weather finally cleared to the point where she could pay a visit to the local Radio Shack, where she was pleasantly surprised to learn that she could get herself a new high-falutin' Trac-fon, a car charger, a regular charger, a nifty carrying case and a deal on 300 minutes with the coupon she'd found on the floor of the Piggly Wiggly, all for less than the price of a new bat-tree, inclusive of their outrageous 8 percent sales tax or something like that. I'd stopped listening. I have a very distractingly cute boyfriend after all.

Shortly thereafter, her overly-active bladder came a-calling and she abruptly ended the call (probably had something to do with the balance left on the 300 minutes) and I went back to ice cream and baseball and my cute boyfriend, who was kind enough not to ask for an explanation for any of it.