Our Mother is NOT your personal Miss Trixie! Let her retire!

The BBQ Pit
1

This is just a very long vent on a family situation that is irritating to me; totally understand if nobody wants to read the whole thing, but “tis the writing of it all that signifies”. The full backstory could fill 18 Proustian volumes but I’ll try to condense them into a paragraph each.

Dramatis Personæ:

Me- I am 38 years (and one day) old, a middle class college professor whose usual brokeness is due by my own admission to fiscal irresponsibility and a love of restaurant dining. I live 220 miles from my mother and 400 from my sister.

My mother (hereinafter Mama): She is 70 years old. She has suffered a lot in her life and never once in silence; I’d judge her about equally sinned against as sinning. To say that she can be difficult is roughly equivalent to saying Lizzie Borden could be a problem child (she was bipolar and refused to be medicated, had when she was younger a temper that could make milk boil inside the cow [still does but it’s far less volatile now that she’s old and her children aren’t dependant on her], has “attempted” (note parentheses) suicide enough to be the personal Lordess & Savior of Harold Chasen, but after a roller-coaster relationship with her for 38 years I can say pretty much all is tentatively forgiven. I am her youngest and favorite child (she’s never made any secret of the latter), which my siblings always thought gave me special privileges and an easier existence, but anybody who has ever been the favorite child of a difficult mother can attest: you EARN any special privileges.

Anyway, when she’s not being a psychotic raving unreasonable bitch (and she usually isn’t), my mother can also be one of the sweetest most selfless people you’ll ever meet, and while she could be scary as hell (ah… the stories I could tell… the stories I’ve never told anyone) she could also be a wonderful mother. She has devoted decades of her life to caring for elderly relatives- her grandparents, then her parents, then my father’s bizarre and wizened distaff (long after he was dead) including his mother (who was the prom-date of Satan until he got a restraining order- my mother can win any “world’s worst mother-in-law contest” as my damned near immortal grandmother was boiled down concentrated evil), my father’s nonagenarian aunts, etc. etc., sacrificing much of her life to make better the lives of people who never appreciated it and honestly felt she was doing her duty. She had a long unhappy marriage to my father (while my mother could be a piece of work, but my father was no more ideal a husband than she was a wife) and has had an out-of-control-travelling-carnival-malfunctioning-roller-coaster of a life in many ways, having lived across a huge swath of the socioeconomic spectrum (she grew up lower middle class and remained that way after marriage, made a small fortune as a lady wrestler in her late teens, lost it in my father’s failed political bids and bad farm investments, lived as an upper middle class teacher and housewife into her late 40s and then was plunged into absolute destitution after my father’s death due to his mountain of debts [many of them incurred for the education of his older children], fought her way back (kicking and screaming and taking frequent fifteen minute suicide breaks, but nevertheless diligently) to a comfortable middle class existence, and did it with help from essentially nobody (save, I must add, for myself- I lived with her lllllooooooonnnggg after I wanted to help her both financially and emotionally).
THIS IS AN INCREDIBLY CONCISE SNAPSHOT OF MY MOTHER, A VEEEEERY COMPLICATED WOMAN (were she a character in a book it would be hard to say if she were the heroin or villain)

My sister: She’s 46 and is an avalanche of personal contradictions raised to critical mass and given consciousness. Like my/our mother there are things about her that make you want to disembowel a wildebeest with your bare teeth and things about her that make you damned proud to share her genes.

All of the following is true of “Anna” (which is her real name but not the one she goes by):

*a Fundamentalist (hardcore) & R-A-B-I-D Republican
*richer, if not than God, then at least richer than any three archangels
*unbelievably generous with her money
*stingier than Hetty Green [this really is in addition to the above]
*capable of simultaneously believing that God sent hurricanes to punish Florida for a gay pride march in another city several months before and that God so loved her grandmother-in-law that he made blackberry juice materialize on a grocery store shelf just to help her upset stomach
*incredibly racist
*loves black people and Asians (again, in addition to the above- LONG stories, but it’s true
*former valedictorian of her high school class who graduated Pharmacy school with high honors
*a person who not only has not read a book (other than the Bible and various conservative Christian commentaries on same) in well over 20 years but is damned proud of that fact
*happily married to a man who recently had a stroke that has left him physically well but somewhat childlike
*retired- she and her husband, who are millionaires several times over, sold their business just before his stroke and have essentially done nothing since
*will turn the air blue cursing to me and our brother (to whom neither of us are really close, to be honest) about what a manipulative bitch our mother is (and she can be) and how much she detests her
*goes to my mother’s house and stays for days at a time several times per month because even though she owns four houses and several rental properties it’s the only place she really feels at home (her words) and, when her husband had his stroke, called my mother pleading with her to come down and take care of her (and, when my mother went down [pretty much the second she got off the phone] Anna damned near kidnapped her and kept her under house arrest and slept in the bed with her the entire time her husband was in the hospital- her love-hate relationship with our mother I have realized only in recent years is in many ways more intense than my own even though I am “the favorite” and had the pleasure of the woman all to myself for years and years and years

More to come in just a moment.

2

A relevant backstory about me, Mama and Anna’s money:

My parents both worked their way through college- the whole Ramen noodle thing- back in the 40s and 50s respectively. They vowed their children would never have to do that.

My brother and sister, who are 8 and 7 years older than I am, went to college in style. Both were valedictorians from a locally prestigious private school who received full tuition scholarships, which helped. What helped even more: my parents bought them both brand new cars to go to school in, paid the rent on a very nice apartment for them, gave them department store credit cards and never complained about the charges so long as they kept their grades up (which they did), gave them thousands in cash to use to establish themselves when they graduated, bought them a housefull of furniture, etc… My father made one request: he wanted to retire between the time they graduated and I started college, so they were to help him and my mother pay my way through college.

Now, I was a miserable jr. high and high school student for many reasons, some of them my fault and some of them not- too long and involved a story for this. Also, my father was firmly convinced I was retarded due to an IQ test I was given when I started elementary school which, for whatever reason, I botched. (Since adulthood I’ve never tested below genius level on IQ tests, which I say not to brag [because in fact I don’t even believe in IQ tests for the most part] but as proof I’m not retarded [though I did used to often wonder if I was and perhaps my friends were too polite to mention it]). Anyway, for these reasons I was removed from the private school and sent to one of the world’s worst public schools in rural Alabama. My grades, already mediocre (except in math, where they were dismal) nosedived after my father’s death (when I was in 10th grade), about the time my sister and brother (who both began college early) were graduating. I graduated high school by the skin of my teeth and the good graces of a science teacher who happened to like me and, I don’t know but I am convinced, raised my science grade to a D to let me by. So, my beginning college wasn’t exactly auspicious by any means.

My mother paid for my first year while my siblings (both pharmacists) began their careers, married, set up housekeeping, etc… Both were soon in very lucrative positions; by 25 my brother was a six-figure manager for a drug chain and my sister, whose husband was the only child of a very wealthy mother, was making quite good money as a manager for a chain herself. Point: while not yet rich, both of my siblings were doing quite well financially and had money to spare by this time.

Meanwhile, my mother’s finances were tanking fast. Things went from bad to work to absolutely desperate as utilities were constantly being disconnected, the house and properties my father left seized or foreclosed on by his army of creditors, and at one point my mother, disgusted with not having money even for cigarettes or gasoline, actually sold her wedding ring (not her engagement ring, which she had given to my brother when he married, or her other valuable jewelry which she had given to my sister, but just the gold band) along with my father’s band and her dead mother’s wedding band as scrap gold to buy gas and a carton of smokes. Things were desperate. I made shit money working part time but not enough to make a dent in expenses.

My siblings never once offered to help financially. I had to drop out of college due to money, my mother in spite of literally wearing out shoes in job searches could not find work (overqualified, underqualified, too old, etc.) and we were living in a crumbling rambling house in the middle of the woods in Alabama that we could not sell in years and years of trying. Nightmare time but I won’t go into details other than to say I’ve always had major resentment over my siblings refusal to help; twice when I called them [on a rare occasion when we had a phone connected] literally begging for money to pay the mortgage up as we were about to be evicted and to their credit they coughed up a thousand or so each time; both times it went immediately to back bills (we were so broke we couldn’t afford to rent movies for the VCR at this time; we were eating one meal per day of chicken leg quarters bought for $.19 per pound until we couldn’t eat chicken for years, the point being this was not from pissing away money but from having to maintain $2,000+ per month in mortgage payments and mandatory expenses and the care of the last surviving nonagenarian at a time when our total income [my Social Security check and my aunt’s old age pension] was less than $600 per month). Both times I was made to feel like the bastard at the family reunion for asking and for years both siblings through this money up to me (and in fact, neither me nor my mother ever paid them back the not-quite $3,000 they gave us over a period of two years) until a few years ago I said some things that perhaps I shouldn’t during a time of stress and they never brought it up again.
This was a time, incidentally, when my brother would call to tell my mother that he just bought a speedboat or my sister to tell her that her husband just bought an airplane at a time when my shoes were held together with rubber bands [true, not just melodrama] and my mother [a woman who’d once traded Cadillacs each year] had holes in her soles from looking for work doing anything from waiting tables to giving out cheese samples, always being rejected, and a time when we lived in the middle of nowhere without a phone and for the only time my mother’s suicide attempts were real and there was no help and anything I gave her as an incentive to go on was a lie (including a few faked “supernatural” experiences), but I digress.
When I asked later why my brother and sister didn’t at least help me through college, they responded “Our agreement was with Daddy. He was dead. The agreement was over.”

But things recovered. The banks took the house and after a very very very “hit-the-rapids” transition period it turned out for the best. My sister and brother are to this day nostalgic for the family land and houses and my mother and I want to puke when they’re mentioned. We moved to the city, took shitty jobs, lived hand to mouth for some while [pawning the TV when we were short at the end of the month for money that seems so piddling now] and gradually recovered. My mother worked her way up to better paying highly responsible jobs, I returned to college where, unlike high school, I was continually on the Dean’s List even though I was working 40 hours and more per week, and many years later she is making more money than she ever made (unless you adjusted the wrestling fees for inflation) and I’m a college professor and all is generally well.

The problem: my mother wants to retire. Story to be concluded in a moment.

3

I had no idea this would be this wrong- I was pissed off when I started writing. I’m pretty sure I’m writing to an empty house but even so it feels good to write it.
My mother wants to retire. She’s seventy years old and she’s tired and she has many health problems (most brought on by the fact she is still a heavy smoker long after her first hospitalization for chronic lung ailments and emphysema- that she’s not on oxygen permanently is a minor miracle). She’s been working and or otherwise on the go ever since she married fifty-four years ago. If she retired today she would have an income of about $2,000 per month (which, in Montgomery AL, is enough to make it on- you won’t luxuriate, but you won’t starve) and she has not quite one year’s salary saved. However, she is absolutely TERRIFIED of being broke again. Absolute phobia.

My sister, meanwhile, literally has millions. I have personally seen her with $80,000 in cash in her purse and a casual “I need to take this to the bank tomorrow- I don’t feel comfortable keeping this in the house”. She has no children and no close friends and her husband has no biological family left at all other than cousins he isn’t close too, but Anna will not help my mother retire.

Now that my mother is no longer desperate for money (and ever since we had our “revelations” blow-out a few years ago) Anna has been very generous to my mother- she’ll give her $1,000 here and $1,000 there as birthday or Christmas presents and has even taken her on vacations (though Mama won’t usually go since vacationing with my sister is more like being on a white-collar prisoner transfer). She buys my mother’s medicine quite often (as a pharmacist she can still buy it at cost through her former store). But she refuses to do anything that can help assure my mother that retirement is feasible, such as promising to always provide her with medicine (my mother’s medicine is very expensive due to all of her lung ailments) or paying off my mother’s mortgage (I wouldn’t even mention something this generous if I didn’t have the absolute knowledge that my sister has well over $1 million LIQUID- she would literally NEVER miss a meal or even a luxury paying off my mother’s house or credit cards, which of course would make my mother’s retirement income stretch that much further).

I thought perhaps that Anna was just oblivious, so I finally told her “Look, she’s old and she wants to retire. You have NEVER been poor- you may have had some months when you were starting out that were close scrapes perhaps or you may not have always been rich, but you have no idea what it’s like to be honest-to-god-flat-on-your-ass broke with no prospects of things getting any better- you don’t know how people treat you when that’s the case or how just generally shitty things are without money. I do. Mama does. She would gladly gladly gladly rather die than face it again, and that’s not just her melodramatic suicide attempt talking, I guarantee you she means it.”

I also tried to appeal to her business sense: “Look on it as an investment. Mama’s house is worth at least $25,000 more than she owes on it and the property value is rising. You can pay it off and I will sign over any inheritance rights I have to the place today- you can take the whole thing- you’ll make money on it.” Anna was insulted: “Believe me, if there’s one thing I’ve got plenty of, it’s money.”

So I wanted to know why, when you can help this woman retire and enjoy whatever is left of the rest of her life, don’t you? I know you would never let her go without, but she’s a very proud woman and she’s not ever going to ask you for help. I know she can be impossible but she can also be fantastic and she is our mother. I’m asking on her behalf without her knowledge."

Anna: “It’s because I do love her that I’m not going to help her retire. Look, when she’s at home what does she do? She watches damned soap operas and does crosswords and plays Solitaire on her computer. She doesn’t have any friends to speak of, she doesn’t have any family around, she doesn’t go to church, she doesn’t have any hobbies, she doesn’t have any interests… if she retires then all she’s going to do is sit at home and vegetate. She’ll just smoke more and sit on her butt all day and do absolutely nothing and then one day she’ll just die in her chair watching Days of Our Lives. I don’t want Mama to die, so I’m going to make sure she has to keep working, because as long as she works she’s doing something vital and she’s keeping active and interested and she won’t have to go senile or just sit around all day. She needs to feel useful and needed and that won’t happen if she retires.”

All I can think of is Miss Trixie, the ancient and senile accountant at Levy Pants in Confederacy of Dunces who wants nothing other than to retire but her boss’s wife won’t let her because she’s a self-important do-gooder who has pretty much identically the same attitude as my sister. “Make Miss Trixie feel useful” when all Miss Trixie wants is to sleep all day and “my damned Easter ham!”

I’ve never asked my sister for anything myself, although I’ll admit (without going into the details) that she did something very nice for me last year without me asking (the first time I’ve ever accepted any of her money- alright, I’ll mention- I had an outrageous credit card balance [due in part from years of low paying jobs and in part to a lay-off when I had to live on the cards and to car repair, etc.- it wasn’t all from total profligacy, but it was a crippling debt] and she loaned me the money to pay them off interest free), but I really want to see my mother retire. Perhaps she would just sit on her butt and watch Days of Our Lives all day if she did, but hell, she’s earned the right. And if she does die soon- well, I’ve had quite a few relatives who made it well into their 90s and would have done better by checking-out twenty years earlier when they were still able to enjoy life some.

So this is a major irritation factor that I had to vent about. I talked to my sister earlier today and it came up. (My brother is also a millionaire who could help, but he was one of the most selfish bastards who ever drew breath- he doesn’t even send my mother birthday cards.) I know that Anna is terrified of losing anybody, particularly after her husband’s close call last year (this is a woman who illegally doped her ancient hound for two years with human meds in order to keep it pain free so as not to have it put to sleep- Anna cannot handle death of anything she loves) and it really is compassion that makes her not want to help our mother, but I wish I could show her how that compassion is misguided.

Rant over.

4

You’re not writing to an empty house. I just wanted to wait until you were done, myself.

I don’t know what to say to make you feel better. Or to make your mother feel better. Or to help you deal with Anna. But I can tell you that some people can’t conceptualize retirement. Usually, they’re the ones who wind up very rich, because they want to work very hard.

I can tell you that your mother probably still has fans. I can tell you that I could probably get a dozen people who would die to interview her, maybe even write a book of her life and times.

I can tell you that it might be possible to talk your sister into giving your mother a sea cruise or vacation in Florida or something, for a few weeks or a month. But I don’t know how much more you can do. Maybe if you focused more on the medication and expenses. Tell her, maybe, that you can’t afford the medicine anymore with the new Medicaid changes and you want her help to try to figure out the best way for your mom to structure her medical plan. Then when the numbers come through, she’ll see. I hope.

5

Alright, take a deep breath. Exhale. Once more.

Feel better?

I’d say something inspiring, helpful or comforting here…but I can’t think of anything at the moment, plus I’m sure someone else will be along shortly. But kudos to you and your mother for working your way back up in the world.

Just one last thought, if your mother really doesn’t have any friends, maybe a retirement home would be good for her? My grandfather just moved into one for the winter (first time in almost 15 years that he hasn’t lived on his own), and I guess he’s enjoying it. If nothing else, she would be around other people her own age.

6

That’s, actually, what I was thinking, about a cruise. A chance to meet people and get out of the house. You can even use her words against her. “You know, we should get Mom out of the house.” Agreeing with people is the best way to get them to do things you want, after all.

7

What a story. I’d read the book.

If mom retired and needed help, would Anna help then? Sounds like she doesn’t want to “enable” your mom to retire, but presented with a fait accompli, could she be counted on later?

Your mom was a lady wrestler? Damn. That’s pretty cool.

8

But the Levy Pants program will make her feel fulfilled!

Sorry - I have no advice to add, just wanted to say I love your thread title.

9

It’s apparent from the middle part of your story that your sister can’t be trusted to help your mother. She’ll do it only if she happens to feel like it at the time, and will have no remorse if she doesn’t help.

Sit down with your mother and show her how she’ll be OK even with nothing else. It sounds like she’ll have the income to make it - get her to understand that. Don’t depend on anything from your sister, and then whatever she does provide will be gravy.

Your mother has lived an incredible life. By all means, she should certainly be allowed to do whatever she wants now.

10

I have no advice, I’m afraid, but I just wanted to let you know that I read your posts and was pretty much blown away by the tale. I’m sorry that your brother and sister are so self-centered, too. You’re a good man, and I hope this works out in some way.

11

$2,000 a month isn’t a lot to retire on if you have a mortgage payment and medical costs that won’t be covered by insurance or Medicare. It’d be much better for your mom if Anna would see the light and pay off her mortgage.

You say your mom has a year’s salary saved. Is that enough to pay off the mortgage? Is the house in good shape, won’t be needing major repairs any time soon? Maybe mom could pay it off, and look into a reverse mortgage if she needs some more income down the road. ?

12

I’d let your sister have it, no shit. I would sit down and make a well-reasoned and compelling argument allowing for rebuttal to her response, revise it, rehearse it and find the appropriate time to confront her, maybe shoot her an email, something like “sis, it’s me bro, we need to have a talk. let me know when’s good for you.” Then when you have her, light in. This is probably terrible advice, but I am just thinking about the one time it seems like you got through to her (your inappropriate comment that actually permeated her self-centered outlook). So she can be nice. Being nice when it’s easy its really just being happy. you need to tell her all you’ve told us . . you use mom, you crawfished on your promise to dad, you’ve got plenty of dough, help mom out.

if that doesn’t work find her preacher and bribe him to tell her that that’s what God would want her to do. maybe speak in tongues for effect. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that: 1. he’ll take the bribe; and 2. she’ll listen. :wink:

13

You reap what you sow. I feel so sad for all of you. The movie “Prince of Tides” comes to mind.

14

My mother used to be very embarassed over her months as a lady wrestler (this was in 1956-57) and wouldn’t talk about it. I actually learned about it from a schoolyard taunter (“Hey, I hear yo mama was a lady rassler!”) and honestly didn’t know what in the hell he was talking about, thinking it was just a “Yo daddy’s a big fat queer!” type generic attempt to get a rise. Only much later did she even tell me about it.

At the time she was making $150 per month as a bank clerk and was offered the chance to earn that much per night (300 per night minus a 50% managerial fee to Billy Wolfe [husband of wrestling champ Mildred Burke and the king of Ladies Wrestling]. My mother is from tiny town Alabama but was originally given the persona of an East German refugee whose father was a powerful Nazi (this because she had taken German as her language requirement in college) and wrestled as "the Blue Angel" until a letter from an attorney representing Billy Wilder made them change, whereupon she became Lady Paine. After less than a year, my father, who seeing the had been all for the move originally, got a major class of middle class respectability and insisted she stop, besides which they wanted to adopt children one day and he didn’t think it would bode well. (They were told they could not have children biologically, but eventually had three the old fashioned way.) She left with a war chest of several thousand dollars (a considerable sum in the late 1950s) which they used to buy my father’s family’s farm and as the basis of savings.

Almost forty-five years later I was helping a student research a paper on lady’s wrestling and stumbled on a web-site with a picture of several wrestlers from the Wolfe stables and am positive one is my mother. I debated showing it to her but finally did, and it was almost tender: “No that is not me… I don’t think… I don’t think about those days… GOOD GOD ALMIGHTY MAE YOUNG IS STILL ALIVE! I remember that bitch put Greta Knight in an illegal sleephold one night in Biloxi and… oh shit, Moolah is 75 my ass… which presidential administrations is she not counting… you know Billy Wolfe and Mildred Burke’s son became a professional violinist which had to have… why that’s Bea FeatherBonnet, the Chickasaw Princess, I haven’t thought of her in forty years she was queer as a three legged goose and married to this… Jemima! She was the only black w… how do I make this thing move down? Is there another page if I push something?”

It was almost like Norma Desmond looking through Fatty Arbuckle’s scrap books.

Two VERY TRUE quick stories about my mother that demonstrate her complexity:

  1. During a huge argument ca. 1997 over my “condition” (as she calls it) she was telling me that I’m going to hell because the Bible couldn’t be more clear in what it thinks of homosexuals. I responded that I’d have company, because the Bible also couldn’t be said to condone wives who shoot at their husbands. My mother:

What in the hell are you talking about?

Give it a break Mama, it’s just me and you. You know damned good and well that you shot at Daddy several times- don’t lie, I saw you do it.

Coldly and indignantly, after sucking on a cigarette:Your daddy… was over six feet tall… and weighed anywhere from 250 to 300 pounds for most of your life… If I had shot at him he’d have been dead! [Takes another drag off her cigarette, a deep breath, then continues] *Now I will admit that I fired some shots a-r-o-u-n-d him a couple of times, but it was only with a 22 and it was because it was the only way to make him listen!"
2. During the integration of the public schools in Alabama my mother was teaching at an elementary school in a tiny town in central Alabama. The school had received death threats for any “nigger chile” who entered. On the first day of the school year several white-trash racists showed up, some of them with shotguns and pistols clearly visible through their windshields. Of the several dozen black children who were eligible to attend this school, only about ten showed up; there were no camera crews or National Guard units standing by as this was going on all over the South- just an old redneck sheriff who, to his credit, had indeed told the crackers that he’d blow the head off anybody who “shot a defenseless little nigger- this ain’t their doin’”.

My mother is standing on the stoops of the school with some other teachers, all of them scared (and several as racist as the spectators). The few black parents brave enough to show up to send their children are holding their hands while being called names. The children begin going up the steps into the school. The unmistakeable sound of a shotgun pump is heard and my mother, totally without regard for her own safety, swoops down and throws her body [she was always a large woman, whether in one of her fat periods or not- tall and broadly built] over two unattended small black children, literally being a human shield. By all accounts, she did this unthinkingly, the maternal instinct to preserve and protect the cubs crossing race lines. (The person with the shotgun never fired, due in part to the old redneck sheriff’s threat- he was an old man who nobody doubted would kill.)

Now, the same woman, almost forty years later, is with me in an IHOP in Montgomery, Alabama. We’re in a booth in the smoking section and from where she’s sitting she can see the whole area and I can just see her.

Do you mind trading seats with me?

Sure. Why?

loudly whispered:Sitting right behind you over there is a mixed couple- black man and white girl- and it’s taking my appetite away. You’re not as bothered by those things as I am, but I grew up in a different world.

It’s one of those “sigh and nod” moments- you’re not going to change her mind and she is your mother. (She has a black assistant at work that she loves dearly, would walk through fire for- has loaned her money knowing it would never be repaid, let her stay in her house for a few days when she was on the road from an abusive ex, calls her “my second daughter” [and the assistant calls her ‘Mama’ half the time], but she’ll still use the ‘n’ word interchangably with black when in private. Southern racism is an almost undescribably multilayered and impossible to explain phenomena, especially among the pre-integration generations- it is not hatred but separatism blended with nostalgia blended with "if one more paradigm shifts I’m going to scream"ism and some just individual weirdness.)

15

Heh. Not only are Mae Young and Moolah still alive… they’re working for the WWE (WWF) (WWWF) for Mr. McMahon Jr. I tell you what, I’m pretty darn sure I know this guy who would kill to interview her. Heck, our own Hardygrrl… where is she, these days? She was dating a writer for a fairly large wrestling sight, as I recall.

Your call. Well, her call. But if she wants someone to listen to her stories and treat her like a goddess of the glory days, I’m pretty sure I can make the two meet. The question is who… well, one guy’s had two books published, so… probably him.

16

This is a great description of a phenomenon I have tried many times to explain to those who do not understand. It’s the reason why you can’t give both barrels (sorry, Cindy) to the little old lady in the store who asks you if you could do her a favor and ask the “colored fellow” in the bakery if he has any fresh rye bread today.
Another thing, please write a book about your family. Please.

17

I just wanted to post my appreciation of the literary reference in the OP. That’s one of my favorite books.

18

Kudos on the subtle thread crossover. You’re a real pistol.

19

I was surprised to see this one resurrected while cruising the Pit. For those interested in an update, my mother retired. So far she’s sitting at home most of the time doing nothing and enjoying it.