Dispatches from Texas, part 4

Last night, my parents had gone to their band practice. They were big band geeks in high school and college. This is how they met. They tried heroically and desperately to turn their children into band geeks, which assured that we would never ever ever have any interest in being musical, at least in relation to marching and brass bands. Nonetheless, the fact that they are still very active in several different bands, is rather heartening.

Last night, while they were at band practice, my father tried to call me. First, he called my cell phone, but it was charging in the other room. Then he tried to call me on their house phone. I didn’t answer because I did not figure that it was for me and I was not anticipating any disasters coming out of a band practice. Yes, I am nearly four decades old and my Dad upbraided me with “we could have been in an accident. We could have been trying to contact you for an emergency. Did you think of that?” Welcome to my life from 1980 to 1995 and, apparently, beyond.

Later, when they got home, he gave me the little speech about ever impending doom on the other end of the phone line, then he checked his messages. “Oh, Clio,” he said. “A man left a message for you. He didn’t say his name, he just said ‘call me as soon as you can.’” No one that I know, who knows where I am, has my parents number. After a quiz about the timbre, pitch, depth, and defining characteristics of the anonymous man calling me at my parents house, my dad checked the caller i.d. The call was from him.

The reason that he was calling was that my grandmother, my mother’s 91 year old mother who caught the last plane out of New Orleans before Katrina and who has not yet died because God and the Devil are still debating who gets her, fell and broke her leg. He had to fly over there today. My mother, who tomorrow is facing a complete hysterectomy and the removal of a 8 inch tumor that may or may not also be attached to other organs and may or may not have to have a part of her intestines removed as a result, thinks she has the better deal. My grandmother, to say the least, is a handful.

I'm starting a pool as to when and for what reason she will be kicked out of the nursing home where she will now have to reside. I anticipate 6 weeks before she has dropped the southern lady facade and begun a campaign, based on guilt and self-pity, to impose her own dicatatorial will upon her fellow residents. She will be evicted for general unpopularity after she has used an ethnic slur against one of the nurses.