Drivin' by Matthew McConaughey's

        

           
           "We drove by Matthew McConaughey's house last night."
           I strive for safety.  "That's nice, dear." 

Lily gives me an exasperated look.  "You don't know who he is, do you, Mother?"  Lily is twenty-one, a college junior, and knows everything.  "He's the movie star, the one who was in that space movie with Jodie Foster.”  Her voice drips daughterly contempt.

I decide to assert myself.  "Oh, he's the one who was arrested for playing his bongo drums and dancing around naked one night with the window open." 

"Not so loud."  Glancing around the upscale deli she's lured me to for lunch, Lily checks to make sure none of the other college-age customers have heard me.  She's funny that way, very self-conscious, which is odd because I'm the opposite, a born performer.  Maybe I didn't get enough attention as a child and have been making up for it ever since--and maybe, as a reaction, I gave Lily too much attention and she's spending the rest of her life avoiding it.  Or maybe it's just mutant genes. 

Whatever, Lily can't help but get attention wherever she goes. She's a white blonde, some sort of throwback to pure Scandinavia, I’d guess.  She's three inches taller than I am and built slender, with wide shoulders and hips.  Every male eye in the place lights up when she enters a room, but she immediately lets the hopefuls know she is committed, that she has a boyfriend and is faithful to him.

I think she hides behind him.

"Did Kevin drive you by Matthew McConaughey's house?"  
Kevin is the boyfriend.  They've been going together for two years now, so I guess I've come to accept him.

Lily rolls her eyes.  "No, Mother.  Kevin is at karate on Wednesday evenings. You know that."

Well, I didn't know that, but I let it go, which is something I work hard at, letting things go and maintaining my cool.  I want a better relationship with my daughter than my mother had with me.  It wasn't that Mother and I fought--it was just that we never really got to know each other outside of being mother and daughter.

Our number is called and Lily leaps up to fetch our matching plain-and-dry turkey sandwiches. She must be hungry because she starts on hers the second she arrives back at our unstable little table.

After a few bites, the conversation resumes.  "Jennie and Tiffany and I were out driving around Old Austin, and I was showing them where Granny and Granddad used to live so we drove by Matthew McConaughey's since it was in the same neighborhood."

I decide to risk it.  "And was he dancing in the window?"

She laughs.  It is amazing how food improves her mood.  Five minutes before she would have been scandalized. "You're so wicked! No, he wasn't home."

"How do you know?"

"His van was gone."

"How do you know he has a van?" I’m heady with conversational success.

Lily has the grace to look a little embarrassed.  "Well, we've driven by there before."

“You and Jennie and Tiff?”

“Yeah.”

"And?"

"And what, Mother?  We've never seen him.  What did you expect?" 

Now she’s mad at me again. I feel my way carefully across my unsteadfast verbal footing.  "I should think he would realize at first sight that three such lovely girls are destined for Hollywood stardom." 

Was it a save?

Lily smiles her forgiveness and reaches across to take my free hand.  "I'm sorry I'm being such a bitch.  Thank you for putting up with me."

My heart overflows.  I remembered the tiny bald-pated baby the nurse put into my arms in the hospital, the one with the perfect little nose and rosebud mouth.  I remember the shy toddler hiding her head under my loose shirts when I tried to introduce her to my friends.  I remember her in early grade school, never wanting me to leave, and  in later grade school, being mortally embarrassed when I would stay.  I remember her talking over her middle school problems with me until I felt like screaming.  I remember my pride when she delivered her high school baccalaureate prayer.  I love her so much.

"You're not a bitch.  You just have a lot going on right now." 

We finish our sandwiches and head to the car.  I look around.  The clouds are white and fluffy in a sunny, bright blue sky.  "It's a nice day to be on the road."

 I unlock the car doors.

Lily smiles at me and checks her watch. "I don't have to get back yet. We could drive around for a while. Do you have the time?”

"Sure."  I don’t have the time, really, but I'd rather spend it with my daughter than stocking up on groceries.  I pull out of the parking place and find my way to an exit from the shopping center.  "Where do you want to go?"

"How about Granny and Granddad's old neighborhood?"

"Great."

Husband’s parents had lived in an older section of town--rather posh, actually.  When I was first married, I used to imagine myself getting hold of one of the big, old houses nearby and renovating it, and I still like to drive down the narrow, tree-lined streets and dream a little. 

I head west. The ride will be easy on the digestion.. 

There's something about being in a car.  Maybe it's the small, closed space or maybe the rhythm of the road.  I can feel the intimacy starting to build between us. Please, God, don’t let me screw this up.

I turn into my parents-in-laws' old neighborhood and slow my speed. 

It was too bad that my mother never learned how to drive.  What would she have been like on an outing like this, I wonder, with just the two of us in the car, isolated from the world?  Could we have talked as two people who loved and cared for each other, or would it still have been the same constrained parent-child relationship?

I tell Lily a little of what has been going on at my job lately and she tells me a funny story about her roommate

"How is Kevin?"  I venture.

"Why?  What have you heard?  Did Ethan tell you something?"  Lily's voice is sharp.

Wrong move. What’s up? 

I make my voice soft and reassuring.  "No, he hasn't said anything.  You know how close-mouthed he is." Lily sometimes confides in her older brother and is always concerned that he may be passing information on to me, which he sometimes does. "I'm sorry if Kevin's having more problems."

Kevin is always having problems, which Lily sympathizes with him about and helps him solve.  He is a project, as far as I can tell, and she has improved him a lot, but not enough that he is in the least interested in attending college or getting any sort of training to raise himself from being a stock clerk at Best Buy.  To make it worse, his father remarried recently, and the new wife tossed the old offspring out the door, so while Lily is mothering Kevin, he is mothering his younger sister, which makes Lily, figuratively speaking, a grandmother before her time.

Lily stares straight ahead, not looking at the houses. "His sister is sneaking out at night and meeting boys."

"That must be hard on Kevin."

Lily's voice hardens.  "It's hard on me.  He got me up in the middle of the night to help hunt her down.  And I had a biology test the next day."

I make soothing sounds, not wanting to risk words.  My own mother never lacked for words.

"It's just fine for him," Lily continues.  "He calls in sick and gets to sleep till noon, but that was my midterm!" 

"I’m sorry.”

“Kevin really makes me mad sometimes.  I’m thinking of breaking up with him.”

“Oh.”  I’m not weighing in on that one. 

I drive slowly past her grandparents’ old home, and Lily cranes her neck to keep the house in view as long as possible.   We drive a few more blocks in silence.

Finally Lily sighs, looks at her watch, then suddenly smiles at me, her eyes dancing.  "There's still time.  Want to go by Mathew McConaughey's to see if he’s left his window open again?"

I smile back at her. “Point me the way.”

 

Requiem for Baby Car

The loss of her Miata is beginning to sink in. Fio loved that car. Small and zippy, it gave her a certain elan, an identity. Every time she stepped out of it, she felt cool--like Auntie Mame. She'd even fantsized that, when her time came, she'd be buried in it.

But instead, Baby Car went first. Fiorella left the rotting corpse with the Mazda dealership over the weekend while she pondered her next move. A friend told her about a trickle charger that might help so Fio will ask the guys about it today when she goes over to the dealership to pick up her belongings, but she has an idea that something like that would only be prolonging the agony.  Face it, Fio--you've had a good run, but Baby Car is sixteen years old, way past her prime, and only because of the great guys as Mazda has she has lasted this long.

The great guys at Mazda--that's another issue. The service department has resuscitated Baby so many times that they (especially Richard Grimm) have become Fio's friends, and she brings them chocolate kisses on appropriate holidays as a stand-in for the real kisses they deserve.

But all that is yesterday, and Fiorella must deal with today. She would love to pick up another Miata, but money has tightened up around Casa Fio this past month and will probably remain that way from now on.  Ah well, maybe Fiorella's writing career will catch fire or she'll strike oil somewhere. But until then, she and Husband will be sharing his car, which is no spring chicken itself, which makes Fio nervous. What will they do if Husband's car develops problems? What if they if they both have must-do appointments at the same time? What about emergencies? Is this the beginning of the end?

Midnight Confessions

Fiorella has, she hopes, done many kind and appropriate things in her life, but the times she has been a total ass are the ones burned into her memory.
*
Fio, a realist, is not impressed by the current art and poetry scene.  In her opinion, both have been rarified to the point of absurdity.
*
"You think too much," Fio's mother told her. But Mother, I needed to understand everything in order to survive.
*
Husband isn't too fond of harvesting fallen limbs and dead trees on the property because they're so irregular compared to the neatened up firewood that HEB etc., sell, but Fiorella likes the twists and turns of what she considers to be REAL wood. She's also drawn to people with interesting twists and turns.
*
Wanna know how powerful Fiorella is? She's the firstborn of ALL her cousins and the only one without a middle name. In her paternal line, she's especially unique in that her given name is original--she wasn't named after any of her relatives.

Questions and Answers

How about a common-sense spray that could be spritzed on all and sundry (especially the sundry)?
*
In a way, long range weather predictions are a downer. Where's the mystery, the excitement of the unexpected?
*
Remember the old days, when every other car on the road wasn't silver?
*
If Fio seems down, it's because she's mourning the death of Baby Car, her 2002 Miata that Mazda has had on life-support for the past couple of years. Guess she and Husband are going to be a one-car family for  while.
*
Actually, this has not been a great weekend for Fiorella in other areas either. It turns out that the payment on Son's student loan will be a hundred more a month than she'd thought. Also, the propane bill was unexpectedly high ($330) due to the winter weather.  And the optometrist that blurry-visioned Fio scheduled an appointment with for this week has canceled. And she still doesn't have all the Christmas decorations down. And the family business thing and the IRS thing are still hanging fire. Fiorella is overloaded.
*
Why has Fio been writing so much about death lately? Probably because Sharon Kite is still on her mind and in her heart, where she always will be.

Further Instructions

If ever I
decide to die--
Which I'm not planning to--
Remember me
with charity
As I, my dear, will you

Adjusting to Amazing

Fiorella has come to terms with "amazing" and "awesome," although they drove her out of her mind at first.  Everyone was using them, especially the vocabulary-challenged home-buyers on HGTV. Everything from floors to ceilings to swimming pools to kitchens to toilets were amazing or awesome. So were beauty-contest winners, actors, politicians, children, pets and God.

But, as a linguist, Fiorella knows that superlatives and emphatics come and go, and many don't even make sense--like "pretty" being used to mean "very"--so she decided to make her peace with the newcomers.

Amazing, right?

Driving, Politics, Neighbors,

Mother resented being required to have a picture ID in order to vote, a common tactic in southern states to minimize black votes, because it meant that she, who didn't drive, had to be transported to the local DPS and stand in a long line to get certified. This was especially ironic considering that she and Dad, having migrated down from Ohio, were some of the few original Republicans in Waco. The rest of them were former Democrats who'd turned their coats when Lyndon Johnson made integration a keystone of his presidency.
*
My parents dodged controversy, although they did have strong opinions that they expressed within the family. Fio thinks it was an immigrant thing--don't stand out, keep your head down, stay safe. An example--they lived in Waco, but Fiorella pounded a sign into their front yard when she was running for the school board in Austin, and three minutes after she got into the car to drive back home, Dad had pulled up the sign, saying the neighbors might think it was a For Sale sign.
*
"What will the neighbors think" was the family mantra. Fio heard it when she started swinging around the street light pole during a long, tiresome wait for a bus downtown (because Mother didn't drive). Singing in public was another no-no, but little did Mother know that Fiorella sang long and loud when she walked home after school every day (because Mother didn't drive).