Mother's humor

This was from yesterday. I was at the Bark Park and had called Mother to see how she was. She told me about an episode that my stepfather (who has heart trouble) had had. Then she got to reminiscing about her father. “They used to tell you just to drink for heart trouble. They didn’t know what else to do for you. Which was part of the reason Daddy was the way he was. 'Drink water and alcohol,' they’d say. Course, Daddy usually left off the water part.” John, Friday, May 11, 2012

From a phone call with my Mother over the weekend

My mother is the funniest person I've ever known. She can make anyone laugh and regularly does. It's often a special, self-deprecating kind of humor. For example, she was warning me about a statin drug that she had been taking but stopped because it could impair memory. She asked me if I was taking a statin drug. I said, Yes, and she wanted to know what one. When I said I couldn't remember, she burst out laughing and said, "See, you better stop taking that stuff!" Last weekend, we were talking about the places she had gone to school in West Virginia. That place is the mythic ancestral home for me, and I want to know as much about it as possible. We had backtracked to Welch from Baltimore, which is where she had gone to look for work as soon as she was done with high school. And also, I think, because her boyfriend from school had joined the service and had been sent there for training. "You know what I really wanted to do?" she asked. She knew that I knew she had always wanted to be a singer, but this was something else. "I wanted to be a comedian. I could always make people laugh. Especially in school. I was always the youngest in the class, and I didn't have anything, but I could make them laugh. It was how I got accepted." John, Tuesday, May 8, 2012

EWWWWWW! GROSS!

We had been driving back from the Bark Park, and she had been asking about eye color. Evidently, there is a boy in her class who has blue eyes but his parents both have brown eyes. She didn't see how that was possible. "No, it's possible," I had said. "You get half of what makes you Maia from your father and half from your mother. The combination of the two makes Maia. If your father had half blue eye color and half brown eye color, his eye color would have been brown. But if he gave the blue to you and your mother also gave a blue to you, then you would have blue eye color." She had thought about this. "But how do they get put together?" "Well, your mother's egg has half of the recipe for Maia, and your father's sperm has the other half. The sperm gets into the egg, and the two halves combine to form the recipe for Maia." "How does the sperm get to the egg?" she had wanted to know. The answer to that is brought on the Great Eww. "Yuckyuckyuckyuckyuck!!! I am NEVER going to get married! Why did you tell me that?" "Well, you asked, Sweetie, and you have to learn sometime." John, Tuesday, May 8, 2012