I just brought the latest issue of the magazine home, so now I have to mail it out. There are six loads of laundry waiting to be done. I haven’t gone in and wiped out any developing cultures in my bathroom for far too long. The lizard needs a sunbath. I’m working on two books: one fiction, one nonfiction. I want to go to the library. I need to go to the post office. I am determined to have a serious workout. It’s pushup day (every other day is), and I’m hoping, in the spirit of the Olympics, to hit a personal best (current personal best: none o’ your beeswax).
Plus there’s an almost untouched pan of brownies with my name on it in the kitchen.
So of course the phone rang with the caller ID of someone who hasn’t contacted me in years, with whom I have an iffy relationship (if it can be called that).
I’m not opposed to having some contact with her per se, though I’d like to work a bit on the timing. And I’m really not set against someone being concerned about me.
I am a little anti-stupidity, especially since there’s less of an excuse for it than ever in this age of information.
Look, it’s sweet of you to worry. Really. But for hell’s sake, before you call to warn me about the tsunami heading my way and urge me to leave town (especially on a brownie/pushup day), could you do a tiny bit of research? You must have been connected in some way to some electronic source of information to have heard about my alleged peril when you live whole states away from me.
Couldn’t you have gone that extra mile, dug around for five seconds the way I just did, and found out that the tsunami currently imperiling me is expected to be three feet high?
Even if that scary wall of water were ten times that tall, I’m really not in any danger.
I don’t expect you to remember the entire half-mile you have to walk from my apartment in order to get to all those stairs you have to climb down in order to safely cross the Pacific Coast Highway in order to get to the beach parking lot which is easily a quarter mile from any water even at high tide. It would be nice if you remembered some of it, but it’s been a while since you’ve been on the coast and memory does blur.
The official emergency gathering place for earthquake and tsunami victims is the elementary school two blocks from my apartment. Granted, it’s two blocks inland. Maybe those are the blocks that will really count. I don’t know. I’m just saying, I’m not sure city officials who hope to be reelected would have designated that spot if they’d thought we should all bring our galoshes, just in case
But this is trivial. This is funny/touching territory, and I’m fine with that.
Where I morph into uncharted bitterness territory is when I hear in a phone message that my “whole family” is “really worried” about me.
My whole family? Really.
My former family cut me off a decade and a half ago, when I mentioned in a phone call that I’d like to talk about some things that had been bothering me for a while. “Oh, you should really get that off your chest some time,” the woman on the other end of the line said. “I have to go now.” And she hung up.
The woman was my mother, and she never called me back. Not ever. She’s always been terrified of hearing anything unpleasant, so she decided it was easier to start answering “Five” when people ask how many kids she has.
Nor has she expressed any interest in my welfare since, or acknowledged the birth of my child or the success of my writing.
News flash, caller: My “whole family” is here with me right now. The people who were related to me until a decade and a half ago are a lot farther away than the four hundred miles currently separating us.
Actually, that’s not true. My family is currently out visiting the rest of my family — the family I was lucky enough to marry into. The people who make me so happy by loving me and exasperating me in ordinary, silly, human ways. I love having someone I can sigh and smile and say, “Oh, Mom” to, like the teenager I always wanted to be, the one who’s a little rebellious but secretly thankful for those stuffy people who care about her so much.
I love being able to click my tongue about my niece’s latest antics, and then reminding my husband to buy a lot of Girl Scout cookies from her when he goes out for a visit.
I have a mom and a stepmom, a dad and a stepdad, a sister and a brother and a niece and a nephew.
I email them articles I think they’d like, and think about them when I read the book reviews or the New Yorker. (I think my mom started subscribing so I’d stop reading her ten-page essays in one sitting. She’s way too nice to say so, though.)
These are the people who know and care who and how I am. They worry about my stupid endometriosis, and probably click their tongues about my on-again-off-again relationship with doctors. (Dad, I’m fine. Really. I’m taking care of myself. I can even do pushups!) They let me drone on and on about my favorite authors — thank goodness Jane Austen is a favorite of my mother-in-law’s, too, or she’d be eligible for pre-death sainthood by now. And I can’t wait to tell my s-i-l about my latest Austen projects. (Mary, remember when we read Sense and Sensibility together? I still think about you every time I get to the part about Margaret not being able to stop running down the hill.)
My whole family, my real family, is worried about me — or would be, if there were anything to worry about. But as it happens, they know I’m fine. I’ve already talked to them.
The imposters can either stop trying to get credit they haven’t earned or start acting like the relations they used to be.
And now I have to go. There’s a tsunami due to go “sploosh” about a mile away. I’ll try to hear it over the brownies with which I’ll be consoling myself.