Category: In Which We Mock the Queen Mother

I knew girls in high school who never left for a date without a quarter to call the parents, in case the boy in question got too handsy. I could never understand how this would work. Were the girls supposed to bail out of the car from whatever isolated location they were in and walk…

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…

Because of this Writer’s strike I’ve been looking for things I like that I might have missed. I found that John Oliver has released a lot of content on the web that I haven’t seen yet. or content I’ve forgotten. Including this vicious takedown of The DaVinci Code. His complaint was that the initial puzzle…

You may remember my charming childhood tale of growing up next to Coldwater Creek, just at the primo time to be splashing in its radioactive waste. I just had to cross the parking lot of the condos across the street and I was in the creek. I lived there until I was twelve, when we…

Remember a few weeks ago when I woke up and forgot Mom had died? Remember, I felt I needed to call her because I couldn’t remember the last time I had called her? And then, I remembered that’s right, she died 13 years ago. It happened again. I fell asleep with the television on, and…

Last Tuesday I woke up and lay there about ten minutes, as is my wont in the morning if I visited the bathroom several times during the “wee” hours. I lay there thinking about moms I know. It occurred to me I hadn’t seen my mom for several weeks. I swear I lay there searching…

Yesterday I found an old 1950s spiral notebook filled with Mom’s handwriting. It is titled CHI OR DIE, and seems to be an account of a train trip she took to Chicago when she was twenty, along with her sister Dolores and four of Mom’s friends. This is one of three travel journals I have…

In Which We Summarize Mom’s annotations on the Palliser Series by Anthony Trollope. On the title page she notes how many times she has read it: The annotations for Can You Forgive Her were focused on underlining every time Trollope uses “it does not signify.” She also commented on this description of George Vavasor’s work…

Long ago my Dad was in the hospital and told me that his cancer was terminal, that he had six months to live if he went on chemotherapy or six weeks to live without it, and he decided to go with the six week option. He got as far as, “six months to live” when…

Ignore the five-year-old version of me on the left, and ignore my freaking perfect cousin Cindy on the right. Focus your attention instead on the storage unit in the background. Mom left the marriage with nothing but that storage unit and our clothes. She packed it up and drove back to Saint Louis. That storage…