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| An actual fortune I received. |
I am able to speak to you because my mother is visiting, and she has just embarked on the evening swimming-karate circuit with the kids. Holy be her name! So I have some blessed free moments before I go play a tennis match.
That's where I've been. There is just so much tennis, it has kind of gotten out of hand. Like, even I must acknowledge this. I am on the two teams, as I've said, Sunday and Thursday ALTA leagues. Then I've signed up as part of two different flex league partnerships, one with Matt and one with a tennis girlfriend. My ALTA teams are both going to playoffs (yay! bag tag!) with an accelerated match schedule, and the flex leagues are picking up, so it's like I'm on four teams. Just scheduling all the matches is kind of a lot of work, what with the emailing and the checking of the calendar.
I told Matt that I could really use a personal assistant to handle some of the load, and he got the funniest look on his face. I wish you guys could have seen it!
So my sainted mother is at my house this week and in my non-tennis moments, we are enjoying rambling around together. Do you know what she does? She fills in the check register in the back of her checkbook with every debit and withdrawal. Isn't that something? Maybe others are still doing this too, but when I saw her pull out her checkbook and make a careful entry, I felt like I did the time I went to Monticello and saw the automated pen machine that Jefferson devised so he could write two letters at the same time.
Another generational thing that I enjoyed: We parked at the grocery store, right next to the cart return where I always park. My mom took a cart out of the cart corral and pushed it toward the store. I said, "You know, they have those inside for us to use." And she said, "I always get a buggy from the parking lot and bring it in." I was like, is that you doing them a little favor? And she said that it was, and that she thought people her age all did that. And she pointed across the lot and sure enough, another mom-aged lady was making her way to the store entrance, pushing her own empty car.
Is this a thing people do?
That's your crash course in Anthropology of My Mom for the day.
I'm going to blog much more in May. I declare it to be so.
xoxo
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11 comments:
I'm probably closer to your mother's age than yours. The only difference, I think, is that I THINK about entering deposits and withdrawals in my checkbook register and THINK about helping out the grocery store by taking in a cart. I don't actually do it, though.
Like Elizabeth, I'm closer to your mother's age also. I am totally negligent about the writing the checks in but I do bring the buggies into the grocery store.
I thought everyone logged all their debits/credits in the checkbook ledger. But I did once upon a time work in a bank branch.
Another former banker here, and I also thought everyone wrote down transactions. How else do you avoid being overdrawn? I'm guessing there must be one of them new-fangled apps for this, eh? :-)
Do I even need to add that I push a buggy into the store with me? :P
My mother-in-law does not take a cart from the corral, but if she sees people heading for the corral with an empty cart, she'll commandeer it from them.
Aha! I am vindicated! And I see I am not the only person who calls them," buggies " instead of carts. Very nice word, buggy. All your tennis makes me tired. Ex-haus-ting. Love being here with you guys and having fun driving the kids around. Meanwhile, Camp Papa trudges the Appalachian Trail . A week is a blasted long hike. Blessedly, I have no such inclinations.
:-) I open Quicken on my laptop and hit "update". I think I'm between you and your mother's age.
I definitely don't balance my checkbook, but I do check my bank balance online regularly. Computers are much better at math than I am! I do sometimes bring a cart into the store with me, but only because I want to get children strapped into it before trekking across the parking lot. I used to think I was being nice by taking my own groceries and cart out to the car, but my dad has me convinced that the people in the grocery store are bored and feel cooped up, and really want to get a chance to get outdoors and get a breath of fresh air, so now I say "sure" whenever anybody asks me if I want help out. And I imagine that that is my "nice gesture" of the grocery store experience.
Let's talk about how things skip generations. I have no compunction to bring carts into stores. In fact, I feel pretty pious about getting them back into the corral. My teenage daughter, on the other hand, is driven to re-fold every polo shirt I examine on the table at J crew outlet and rearrange any accessory rack I disturb in any store. Magnanimous gestures or borderline OCD? Apparently, age figures into this somehow.
Keep blogging, Becky! Consider it your contribution to the collective mental health of your readers. ; )
I am a transplanted Yankee and the word "buggy" is ridiculous to me.
Gosh how I've missed your blog, it's better than TV. And I too get my "cart" first, so that I don't have to walk at a snails pace, holding my two year old's hand, across the parking lot.
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