Let Me Get Right On That

Laura had a friend over to play yesterday afternoon--a child she loooves to play with, the girl who unfortunately has an alien Amwaybot mother. Let's call the child P. L and P spent a good while playing up in L's room and out in the backyard. P had arrived with her cell phone, which she always carries in a little furry phone pouch, and apparently also with a little box of mints. By the way, P is required to always have her phone on her person "so her daddy can get in touch with her at all times." Once, while her mom was dropping her off, she put her phone on my kitchen counter and was rebuked for it. Anyway, when she left yesterday, she had her phone, but the girls couldn't find the candy, and as far as I know, P told her mom this.

Just now I got a text message from the mom asking me, "when you walk up the hill [to get L from the bus], would you bring P's tic tacs and put them in our mailbox?"

Reader, I will not. What I will do is continue to be polite to this woman because Laura adores her daughter, despite the fact that the woman is a classic underminer and a total frenemy. She once asked me, of a painting I had propped on my mantle, "Did someone you really love give you that?" And to Matt, who had just come home from work, where he makes computer games, "Did you program anybody getting shot today?" This is a woman who once asked me to put Laura on the phone to urge her daughter to write birthday thank-you notes in a more timely manner (no). A woman who routinely invites me to "parties" where you have to pay an admission fee in exchange for the pleasure of getting the hardsell on various Amway crap, with invitations couched in terms of "Girls' Night!" and "Makeover!" A woman who, when she saw me wrapping an American Girl doll for L for xmas, asked me if I was aware that the American Girl company "is run by feminists." There is so, so much more.

So what I will do is to continue to forgive this woman for her lapses of taste, manners, and decorum, because I believe that it is not her fault she was raised in a barn. She had a pretty hardscrabble upbringing, from what I can tell. Every bit of middle-class comfort that she has attained, she and her husband got for themselves. And I should say that I do believe somehow that she is a good person. So I will continue to tolerate her eccentricities. But here's what I'm not going to do: go up to Laura's room and look for a half-box of tic tacs.