LITTLE ROCK — “All families are crazy.” - Rufus Griscom It is a blessing that, the week before the Mom left for Louisiana, Jesse pulled out into an intersection and totaled his dually truck.
Jesse had the right-of-way and Andy, who was sitting there right beside him, said the woman in the Toyota came out of nowhere and ran the light. The Georgia state patrolman didn’t agree and cited Jesse-who was taken to the hospital because he blacked out after the accident, NOT before-but Andy figured that was just because the woman was upset and crying, and Jesse was, well, blacked out.
But nobody was hurt after all, though a couple of days later Jesse passed out in the Arby’s and they had to call the paramedics because they thought it was his heart. But it wasn’t his heart, it was his blood sugar (again-the doctor keeps telling Jesse he needs to lose some weight) and after he was released from the hospital that time his daughter Mary Aranza thought he and the Mom might like a little getaway so she booked them a cottage on Tybee Island for the weekend, which was very thoughtful and nice.
But because of Jesse’s troubles, the Mom was having second thoughts about flying to Louisiana after all, even though she’d planned it for months and she wanted to see her granddaughter Nicole compete in the Palomino World Championship Horse Show at the Built Ford Tough Livestock Complex in Tulsa (though at the time I talked to her she wasn’t exactly sure when theshow was going to be held, and when Nicole was going to show).
(Now you should understand, that I don’t know who Andy is and I’m a little afraid to ask, because once about 15 years ago when she was still living in Bossier City I walked into her house on Thanksgiving to find a strange young man in her kitchen who shied from me like Joaquin Phoenix from the paparazzi. When I asked Mom, “Who is this young man I have never before met skulking around your kitchen on Thanksgiving?” Jesse told me he was so-andso who helped him at the antiques and Native American paraphernalia store Jesse was operating at the time and who had “never been to school.” Cleared it right up, he did.)
But anyway, the next morning everything seemed a little brighter and Jesse seemed better, a little sore but not too bad, and resigned to the fact that his driving days were probably over. Mom was satisfied that her sister Patricia and her daughter Jackie and her husband Porter were competent to look in on Jesse now and then (not so much to makesure he was eating right but to make double sure he wasn’t off gallivanting in her Cadillac with Andy) so she decided to get on the plane to Shreveport after all.
In fact when I called her to find out for sure whether she was coming to visit her other daughter Mechele (mother of Nicole), she had already boarded. Surely sometime during the two weeks she’d be visiting them, they could come up to Little Rock for the day? She said she thought she maybe could and we left it at that.
You should understand is that my sister lives near a place called Arcadia, La., in Bienville Parish pretty close to the spot in the road where Bonnie and Clyde were killed in 1934. Aside from this historical factoid, the two most notable features of my sister’s home are:
1) if the fictional town of BonTemps portrayed in Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries and the HBO series True Blood actually existed, it would be nearby; and
2) it’s part of the three percent of the country that has absolutely no cell phone coverage. (The only halfway reliable way to get in touch with the Mom while she’s visiting my sister is by sending messages to my niece via Facebook.)
So it was a few days before I spoke to her again; to see how things were going and to try to pin down a date for her visit. (There are reasons Karen and I didn’t want to make the trip down to Louisiana. For one thing, we’d have to drive 50 miles to go to dinner. For another, we have jobs that more or less require us to make certain arrangements before we go completely off the grid.) The Mom said she and Mechele couldcome up on the weekend as soon as Nicole’s father-Mechele’s exhusband who, days before he filed on my sister, tried to sell me a quarter horse that cost more than any car I’ve ever owned-picked her up to take her to Oklahoma for the Palomino show. But she didn’t know when that would be.
And as it turned out, the ex didn’t come by to pick up Nicole until Sunday afternoon. Mom called from the Wal-Mart in Ruston where she was buying cleaning supplies (?) to ask if it wouldn’t be better just to come up Monday.
“Sorry Mom, we’ve both got to work. How about next weekend?”
Well, the Mom said that wouldprobably work out. She and Mechele would drive to Tulsa for the horse show and stop by on their way back to Louisiana. It sounded like the vague outline of a plan.
Monday afternoon my phone rang. It was the Mom. She was inJacksonville, where she had gone with Mechele to deliver a horse. She wanted to know how far she was from Little Rock.
I pointed out to her that she had to drive through Little Rock to get to Jacksonville.
“Well, I didn’t want to be so close and not call,” she said. And then she and Mechele blew on to Tulsa.
Anyway, the horse show went well-though Nicole’s horse startled and kicked at her in the preliminary rounds. She caught the blow with her right hand, resulting in a hairline fracture, but she was able to ride lefthanded and ended up as the World Grand Reserve Champion.
And the Mom, Mechele and Nicole eventually made it to our house, though they didn’t leave Tulsa until about three hours after the Mom said they would. We took them to dinner and chatted and Nicole passed around photos that had been taken at the Palomino show. When I congratulated her and asked her exactly what it meant to be World Grand Reserve Champion she said: “It means I didn’t win. I came in second.”
The Mom told us all the news from Lake Woebegone, mostly about how Jackie and Porter had finally broken down and started smoking in front of her (it must have been exhausting for them to have run around hiding the ashtrays for all those years) and about how the insurance company was giving them several thousand dollars more for Jesse’s totaled truck than she’d expected. (When I suggested that she take the insurance money and trade in her old Cadillac and buy one sensible vehicle, she said she’s thinkabout an SUV-if she could find one large enough for Jesse to be comfortable in. Sigh.)
Halfway through dinner the Mom’s purse-which is roughly the size of a small child-began to buzz. She dug out her phone, snapped it open and made soothing noises. After a moment, she closed it and told me it was Patricia, who’d told her that she thought that maybe the Mom’s car had been moved.
“But you know my sister,” the Mom said. “She loves drama.”
Perspective, Pages 78 on 07/25/2010