Silence is Golden

The call was destined for disaster. Actually, they all are, so this outcome should surprise no one.

But somehow we all gamely and naively pick up the phone and optimistically hope for the best with every Mom encounter.

The best is not to be.

I ask Charlotte questions so she can have a starting point. Conversations with Mom have  tornado quality to them.  Loud with debris flying in all directions. They are hard to repeat.

"OK - Tel me. What precipitated this call?"

"I called her," Charlotte sniffs.  "I felt bad. I hadn't called her in a while."

I haven't called her in a year. Clearly Charlotte and I have different ideas about what constitutes negligence.

"You're going to have to stop doing that," I say.

"I know. But I knew something was happening in her life. I just couldn't remember the details. Cataract surgery? Something with Bill? I don't know. Something."

Really?  Flesh-eating virus?  Adopted an Indian midget? I'd been blissfully unaware.

"Well, and I've had a lot on my plate, " Charlotte says. "With the boys headed to school and all the nonsense at Gray's house at the shore. I have had a lot of competing priorities."

With all of Mom's transgressions a delayed phone call is going to have you flogging yourself with guilt? I'd let you off the hook with manslaughter.

"So anyway, I called her and she started. She and Bill had just been to see '2016.'"

Oh, good. The documentary putting fear into the hearts and minds of the bigoted and uniformed all across the nation hoping to deter them for voting for Obama in 2012.  Why couldn't she just go see The Dark Knight Rises like all the other lunatics?

"So I let her talk. I will not have a political discussion with her, so I just let her go on and on."

"Fair enough," I say.  "I usually tell her that I will not have a conversation about "fill in the blank." - Politics, our brother, his shrew wife, real estate, gas prices, reverse parking, the NFL draft, Eli and Peyton Manning, or any other number of dicey topics that I would gladly discuss with almost anyone else."

"Yeah, well, I can't get away with that, " Charlotte laments. "And soon enough, Mom notices (remarkably) that I am not saying anything back. That she is doing all the talking. And she calls me on it."

And that is when things got mean. The venom reserved for our sitting President is at once oozing all over Charlotte.