I think my ma slept straight through the 60's. She stayed up listening to Elvis, went to sleep when they shot Kennedy (the first) and woke up in time to hear Tanya Tucker sing "Delta Dawn." Everything in between happened in the darkness for her.
As a result, she has no point of reference for Motown, Stax, psychedelia or the Beatles. As a matter of fact she used to hate The Beatles, with the exception of one song. "I think that song 'Yesterday' is so pretty," she once said.
My mom drank beer as a youngster. During her desperate housewife stage she would drink Mogen David by herself in the living room, listening to Roberta Flack. With the exception of the nicotine she gave up when she was pregnant with my sister, that was the extent of her experimentation.
Because of this semi-sheltered existence, she doesn't get the behavior of a lot of people. That may not necessarily be a bad thing. But still, she doesn't see the sense in a lot of the more extroverted mid-life crises.
A while back she came to visit and started talking about the niece of a friend of hers. She always starts these conversations with the phrase "You remember so-and-so…." The person in question, if I've ever met them in my life, is usually someone I saw once, when I was two. She never accepts that I don't know who she's referring to.
We always have these conversations over breakfast. She likes the way I cook eggs.
Anyway, this niece of her friend is apparently in her early 40's. The woman was married to a very nice, reserved man for 20 and some-odd years. Then BOOM, he died. It came as a shock because he never drank or smoked or went out all night with people who did. (In all of my mother's stories, people who die, die only after living a model life.)
After her mourning, this niece of her friend fell in with some rat-bastard drunk – a real low-life, who has been married numerous times and has been divorced by all of his ex-wives because he was a rat-bastard drunk who left them all penniless. According to the narrative, he's the kind of guy who exclaims things like "Everybody knows, I've drank all my life! I ain't stoppin' now for nobody."
That's the fact of the story and now, this jackass whirlpool of self-destruction is taking down the once sure and steady niece of my ma's friend. She goes out drinking all the time…is close to losing her job. She's bank rolling his binges and is now on the verge of selling her bought-and-paid-for house to buy something else he likes. My ma has no idea what would drive somebody to be that stupid.
"Well, that's the damned thing with drunks and junkies, ma." I told her. "They all seem so goddamned exciting when you're around 'em. Life is vital and thrilling. Every moment is dramatic and every night you narrowly escape a car wreck, a bar brawl or a police chase. It's freakin' breath taking and you'd trade everything you got for that thrill ride. Then one day, you come to on the floor, with a bloody nose, a missed court date and some psychotic, writing suicide notes, in the other room. That's when you realize all the excitement was just you, marching to your doom, like some idiot lemming with an open bar tab. Drunks and junkies, all for goddamn nothing."
My ma kind of looked at me cock eyed for a second.
"Well, I've never been a 'junkie,'" I said, defensively.
My ma's legally blind, so sometimes it's hard to tell if she's thinking, agreeing or judging. She just looks at you.
We sat there eating our eggs and bacon, drinking Coca Cola for breakfast. The little jam box in the kitchen was playing a Beatles mix cd of mine. "I need to re-burn this," I said. "It skips on 'Norwegian Wood.' I hate that."
She nodded.
That's all I have to say about that.