“Maybe you can use what she just said, Dad,” my son announced, prompting a puzzled look from his mother.
“He really wants me to write about you for Candles and Curses today,” I explained, “so he’s waiting for you to say something funny.”
“Sorry, son,” she replied, “but I can only be funny when I’m trying to be serious.”
(Another paraphrased encounter with L’s Mother.)
“Since you said you were going to wait until your foot was better to move the trampoline, I was going to move it for you,” she told me this morning. “Then I realized if I could move it, you could move it, and you probably meant you were waiting to move it until you could use it again.”
She was right too.
(The following is paraphrased, but still an accurate representation of what I took away from the event.)
“You were wonderful last night,” L’s Mother told me with a loving smile early Saturday morning.
Now it’s not that I’ve never heard that sentiment before, but this time it confused me. “All we did last night was sleep,” I reminded her.
“Yeah . . .” she sighed with contentment.
In part due to the aforementioned cloud over this house yesterday, I told L’s Mother that I was going to another room and shutting the door for a bit “until the urge to run away from home passes.”
To which she responded, “Do you want me to knock so you know when it’s passed?”
Years ago I remember Dad telling me how every task in the eyes of one of his bosses was “priority one,” which eventually prompted my dad to ask said boss to please clarify what was “priority one alpha,” “priority one beta,” “priority one gamma,” and so on.
L’s Mother and I do our best to keep this idea in mind in our daily routines, but lately her job has necessitated priorities above “priority one alpha” which she has dubbed “OMG alpha,” “OMG beta,” and “OMG gamma.”
Now I freely admit regarding the event I mentioned yesterday, that a lesser woman would have made my life Hell for a while after something like that, but not L’s Mother. That’s just not who either of us are. Another case in point:
Not long after the picture incident, L’s Mother came in and started venting about something at work, and while I was listening, I was also lacking some necessary context, so I was only getting about half the story and I knew it. Even so, I kept listening, and as the story continued I pulled her a little closer to me.
Smirking, she paused and said, “Annnnd you haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?”
Feigning offense, I retorted “Of course I have!”
“Uh huh,” she said. “And what word have you heard?”
“‘Said'” I said with a grin.
Noting that her hair looked particularly good one day, L’s Mother asked me to take a picture of her; pleased with the results, she decided to use said picture to update her work profile picture. Personally I felt the picture, while technically fine, didn’t really capture her . . . . essence, for lack of a better word, so later on I mentioned I didn’t care for the picture because it “didn’t look like her” to me.
This prompted her to burst into peals of laughter.
Suspicious and wary, but still needing to know, I asked her what was so funny.
Still laughing, she gasped, “Everyone at the office today told me they liked it because it made me look pretty!”
L. (Age 7): Sometimes I lose my mind and don’t know what I’m saying.
Me (Age “Old enough to know better, but young enough to go for the joke anyway to see if his mother is listening.”): You get that from your mother!
L’s Mother (Age “Ageless”): Did you just say he gets that from me? I was going to say that!
Me: “By the way, the baby is fine. He no longer needs oxygen, so they sent him home.”
L’s Mother: “He no longer needs oxygen?! What kind of baby is this?”
Me: “You know what I meant!”
“Do you want to watch something funny and short before bed?” L’s Mother asked me last night, so I took a step back and looked at her expectantly.
She got it.
