Question & Answer

Ask my mom a question and you never know what she's going to say...

Here’s one from 2019 and as you’ll soon see, not much has changed. This was written when I was trying to record our family history, but that project ground to a halt when I realized much of our family history was bullshit produced by generations of people telling stories that made them look good, which is why I wanted to write the family history because then I could be the hero of every story and drop in totally fictional episodes like the time I was named a Medal of Honor winner and American League MVP on the same day.

50 years from now, who’s going to know I wasn’t?

As our current Commander in Chief has demonstrated, if you tell a lie often enough people will believe it so my advice to you is get busy lying.

And a-way we go.

For the past three weeks I’ve been visiting my mom pretty much every day and asking her questions about her life and the answers she gives are sometimes unexpected and almost always funny. Tomorrow she’ll be 94, but despite the fact that she’s slowed down quite a bit, she can still get off a good one-liner with the best of them.

I’ve already told this one, but it’s worth repeating; when my brother Paul T threw out the rhetorical question:

“Who wants to be 100 years old anyway?”

My mom shot back:

“A 99-year old.”

When I described a dimly-remembered trip to Port Angeles, Washington with my dad and seeing a lighthouse, she said he must have taken me up to Neah Bay, “where some Indians live.” When I asked what kind of Indians, my mom said:

“Short and fat.”

With politically incorrect answers like that I can’t believe she hasn’t been offered a prominent position in the Trump administration and her chances of getting elected to public office aren’t good, but she’s way past caring about what other people think. As far as she’s concerned, the 21st Century hasn’t been all that much of an upgrade and she has no interest in what the rest of us imbeciles get up to.

When she asked me what I was doing with all the stories I’m writing and I said I was putting them online, she asked:

“How do you put them on the line?”

When I explained it was “online” and not “on the line” she said:

“I’ve been very careful not to get modern.”

When I went on to explain the internet, Facebook and social media, mom said:

“I wouldn’t like that, sounds like you have no secrets.”

Turns out mom has a pretty good point. As far as she’s concerned the rest of us can go right ahead taking pictures of our food, family and vacations and sharing them with friends and strangers (and possibly the FBI); my mom would rather watch Dr. Phil even though he’s not a doctor.

2025 Update:

Mom can’t see for shit anymore and can’t read her Bible and in my lifetime I’ve never seen her reading anything else, so she plays Fox News all day and has somehow decided Donald Trump is a “good Christian.” The other day she wondered why she hadn’t gotten her letter from the president for turning 100 years old and I blamed Trump for being an uncaring shithead: “See, mom? He’s actually an asshole.” But it turns out it’s my fault because the White House only sends out those letters if it’s requested by a Senator or a House of Representatives member six weeks in advance and I didn’t do anything to get the ball rolling.

See? Lying has a bad reputation, but this is where it comes in handy.

As long as none of you spill the Presidential Letter Beans, she won’t know any of this because she can’t read this blog and now that I think about it, if she can’t read I could give her anything, so I might put my hotel bill in an envelope and sign it “DONALD TRUMP” in huge letters and then she could proudly hang it on her wall in a pantyhose bag right next to her bathroom mail slot.

I’ve had worse ideas.

Turnabout Is Fair Play

Sometimes it’s not the answers my mom gives that make me laugh; sometimes it’s the questions she asks.

In her mind, restaurants not named “Denny’s” are horribly expensive and should be avoided at all costs. Surely there’s something in the refrigerator or freezer that can be defrosted or demolded or whatever process it would require to keep a can of chili beans 10 years past its sell-by-date from killing you and then you could have that for dinner instead of one of those exorbitantly-priced restaurant meals.

When I offered to bring her coffee and fresh pastry, she declined and said she already had stuff we could eat and then asked:

“Do you know what a bagel is?”

When I described a meal I had recently enjoyed, she said it sounded too fancy and asked:

“Don’t they have McDonald’s where you are?”

When I explained they had McDonalds in China and were probably in the process of opening a franchise on the dark side of the moon, she asked:

“Do you have Kentucky Fried Chicken? They serve chicken, you know. And you can get biscuits, mashed potatoes and gravy.”

While I listened to my mom recite the KFC menu by heart, it dawned on me that she’s still worried about me wasting money and going broke by eating in restaurants. If I go get a beer and a burrito in a Mexican restaurant, she thinks I’m living like Diamond Jim Brady and need some kind of family intervention.

When I said I was going to see a movie, she asked which one and when I said Spiderman (I’m a sucker for all that Marvel Comic book stuff) my mom questioned my cinematic judgment and said:

“Why see that? He’s just gonna jump around.”

Can’t argue with her logic, so I didn’t even try. Plus, just as mom predicted, Spiderman did do an abnormal amount of jumping around.

When I decided to give her a break from my questions and not come by her house that day and told her so, she responded:

“Well, I wasted a shower.”

As uncomfortable as the subject might be, when your mom is 93 you need to talk about what she wants done after she’s gone. My dad was buried in the Rocklin cemetery in 1960 and for the past 59 years the plot next to him has been waiting for my mom’s arrival.

But when I asked if that’s what she wanted, she surprised me by saying no; she’d heard the water table was pretty high in Rocklin and no longer wanted to be buried there:

“I don’t want to get wet.”

When I asked her how she felt about turning 94 she started describing her physical condition – “I’ve got a lot more inertia than I used to” – and when I said I meant how did she feel emotionally about being 94 she responded:

“I don’t know. Seems like I was doing the exact same thing a year ago.”

Yeah, mom, I guess you were.

When I told my mom we would take her out to eat and she could pick any restaurant she liked, the first place she named was – you guessed it – Denny’s. That being the case, I suggested that all her boys go to a really nice restaurant, leave her at home and bring her back some leftovers.

“That would be wonderful.”

I then admitted that was bullshit and I didn’t come all the way to California to take her to Denny’s so we eventually settled on local place, not too far away and she said that was OK because she likes their onion rings.

And if I was a betting man, I’d wager she’ll order onion rings as a main course, nibble on a few of them, then take the rest home to be enjoyed over the next three months with cups of reheated coffee from the pot that’s been sitting there half-full since July 4th.

On The Seventh Day He Rested

Tomorrow, I might take the day off, but I’m still looking through old stories and if I find some good ones I’ll post them here even if I have to get on the line to do it.