day one in the blog world

A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and a paper and put down all of my thoughts it would make a book . This almost made me smile as what it would really make would be a whole row of encyclopediacs.

"Gentlemen Prefer Blondes"
Anita Loos

So I get a call from my niece last night. The big news is that her cousin Heather is getting married. This is not a big surprise, since Heather and the boyfriend/fiancée have been an item for a while. It was just a question of time.

The fly in the ointment of this joyous occasion was that neither of us has been invited. Or rather, no invitation has yet arrived. Never one to miss an opportunity to be offended, my sweet little gray-haired mother was launching a preemptive strike down the warpath. The idea that our ever efficient postal system might be falling down on the job had never crossed the old dears mind. If she had her invitation, then everyone else must have theirs!

It might be instructive at this point to give the reader some insights into my mother’s character.

As some people collect string, my mom collects grudges. It has been 75 years, but she is still out of charity with her best friend from childhood for some slight suffered when she was 5. I should also point out that no one is immune. I have been reminded of trespasses that I committed at the tender age of 8, as though they had occurred moments ago. I know that the time my older brother broke her favorite lamp is still waiting in the wings for an appropriate moment to come forward. Barring the appropriate moment, she will drag it up, non sequitur, when she needs to vent and it pops into her mind. As you may imagine, daughter-in-law’s were grudges just waiting to happen. My younger brother’s wife just happens to be a favorite target, so the lack of an invitation was simply one more proof of my sister-in-laws horrible character which was being prepared to be laid at the poor woman’s feet.

Today I got an email from the niece. It would seem that the invitations all wound up being sent to my older brother. (?)
I don’t get it either, but hey, it came. Armed with this news, I called the maternal unit. Not in any real hope of defusing the situation completely, while the old girl was in full battle mode, but I hoped to head off any truly embarrassing repercussions for my sister-in-law. She’s a very nice woman, and honestly, no one deserves the wrath of mom.

It went about as well as could be hoped, though not until mom had made sure to let me know that if we hadn’t been invited it would have been at the instigation of my sister-in-law and her dreadful family, and that she would have had to say something at the wedding. (I case you aren’t getting the picture, my nieces wedding is not about my niece. It is about my mother. Everything that has occurred over the past 80 years as a matter of fact has been, somehow, about mom. Man on the moon, mom’s idea, Viet Nam, because they didn’t listen to mom. Pretty much everything from the great depression, through the Second World War, down to the present day has been about mom.)

As an old queen who has quietly ticked past the half century mark, my goal in life is to live in a drama free zone. This plan is doomed. If it isn’t bad enough that I seem to spend way too much time doing the equivalent of emptying an Ouzi into my own foot, there always seems to be someone out there willing to lend a helping hand.

You gotta’ laugh!

I will update on the wedding folly’s as things transpire.