It Dawns On Me After Four Decades

This morning, something made me think of a fight I had with Mom when I was eighteen.

There was a midnight showing of all the episodes of The Prisoner at Webster University and I wanted to go, as I had no boyfriend and fans of The Prisoner were my demographic. I was all ready to go, dressed in my best ensemble, when my Dad appeared and forbade it, because Mom was crying.

I tried to reason with Mom, and eventually I got that she didn’t want me to drive in the rain.

“Mom, I have driven in the rain before.” No success. Dad pulled me aside and pointed out that Mom’s sister had died in a car accident, driving in the rain to see Mom at the same age.

So, I didn’t go, and thus no doubt dodged a bullet — because there would have been many hot prospects there and I might not have been primed for my Gary whom I met a few months later.

For some reason I was thinking of that this morning, and realized, forty-odd years later, that it wasn’t being 18 or driving in the rain that made Mom so irrational. It was being 18, driving in the rain, TO A UNIVERSITY. When she died, Aunt Dolores was driving to see Mom in her dorm at the University of Missouri in Columbia.

If I believed in ghosts, I would think that the spirit of Mom saw me making coffee this morning and whispered to me, “You were driving to a university, dumbass,” just to settle that argument.