By the time you read this, unless you're Miss Gibson and happen to live on a different continent with a five-hour time difference, I'll probably be in the air on the way to Ohio. With my mother.
Just the two of us making our way through the airport. Just the two of us on the plane to Dayton, sitting next to each other. Just the two of us for hours and hours.
So we don't end up talking about how big the pimple on my forehead is or how much my car needs fixed or replaced or how I wouldn't keep getting stood up on dates if I just changed my mind about being gay or how I need to change jobs and better fulfill my potential as a salesman and writer, I've packed lots of books to occupy her - and my photos from London - into my carry-on. I did this in the hope that we could stay on good topics - or just not speak.
I love my mother. Perhaps to an irrational, creepy, "Manchurian Candidate" degree. But yesterday, when I vented to her about my 400th thwarted potential date this year, she told me that I really sounded like I just needed a good nap.
My brother and his fiancee will be joining us sometime Saturday, I believe. Until then, it's me and my mother.
My mother is having me drive the car in the morning, so I have to drive to her damn house in Buford tonight - even though I live closer to the airport AND next to a damn MARTA station.
She's having me drive so that her husband Jerry can have their car this weekend - and so that she can listen intently to every possible bad sound my car might possibly make on its way to the airport and ask me if I heard it. (My mom's 80-percent deaf, by the way, but her 20-percent hearing ability somehow maximizes when she rides in my car.)
Jerry needs the car this weekend because his brother died today.
"Which one?" I asked my mother when she told me on the phone this morning, making sure I brought my car so that we could still go to Ohio.
My mother thought for a moment about not going, but I'm assuming Jerry told her to go. The last Buford funeral she attended for his family, I think, became a spectacle of wailing and/or snake-handling. I'm glad she's coming to Dayton with me.
The brother that died was apparently Junior, who I think is actually older than Jerry.
I never really got to know Junior particularly well, though I graduated from high school with his daughter Nancy, who used to bully me and steal my pencils when we were in the first grade.
I mostly knew Junior because he would come over and mow our lawn, and he would wave at me.
I tried not to talk to him too much, even though he seemed nice enough, because Junior had a trachaeotomy before I'd met him about 20 years ago and he had to use one of those electronic devices to speak. And when I was 12, that electronic voice just freaked me out.
I mean, it sounded like the old terminal-shuttle voice at Hartsfield Airport.
Every time I heard Junior, I was tempted to move to the center of the vehicle and away from the doors.
Junior's wife was once in the hospital, and we went to visit her. I still remember asking my mother how his wife caught cirrhosis of the liver, and Mom replied by quoting from an alcoholism pamphlet in the waiting room.
Tonight, at the bookstore, some co-workers asked me if I was going. I told them no and started making death jokes.
I said that I was surprised that Junior had lived this long. (Seriously, I thought he was already dead.)
Then I told them that the funeral program may as well have the words "Brought to you by Skoal" printed on it.
My co-workers at the bookstore concluded that I'm not very nice and I'm a total snob.
My asshole stepfather probably could've told them that.
I'm, of course, telling these jokes now because I have to forget them once I get to my mother's house.
I'm afraid that, even though my favorite cousins will all be there, it's gonna be a LONG weekend.
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