*** continued from previous post *** Okay, now we were making progress. "What about the waffle maker? Do you really think we're going to use that?"
"What if we want waffles?"
In your Mother's world, this seemed like a perfectly reasonable question. I was miles ahead of her though, and had already crafted an appropriate response. "What," I said cocking my head and smiling as if I'm pointing out a completely foreign thought, and a rather clever one, "if we don't want waffles?"
That is some fine thinking right there. I was very proud of myself.
She started to rub her temples in slow, circular motions. "Have it your way. The waffle maker stays. Is that it?"
"Well, what about all that food? I mean, we aren't going camping. Can't we just take a couple of things to snack on?"
She looked at me like I had lost what little of my mind I had left. "We need that stuff! You don't know what we're going to run into. What if we are stuck in the middle of nowhere, and it's dark and we get hungry?"
I'm beginning to notice a pattern here. Evidently most of your Mother's reasoning centered around the idea that we were going to be stranded in the middle of nowhere for an extended period of time. At night. This, I'm sorry to say, was part of her delusional state. Poor, poor Mom.
Now before you think that I'm being too hard on her, I'm willing to admit that over the years, there may have been a couple of times when we found ourselves in just such a predicament. You know, you were there for some of them. We've run out of gas a couple of times. Well, maybe more than a couple. Certainly not more than twenty - twenty-five tops. Then there was the time we popped a fan belt, and sat on the side of the road for about 7 hours because I said "We don't need to carry tools. It's a new car." There was the fact that we had been in the ditch a few times, usually in a place that we had no business trying to drive a car. I, on rare occasions, have been known to lock the keys in the vehicle at the most inopportune moments. There were a few incidents with a pesky carburetor on a 1975 Ford Courier. In case you don't know the Ford Courier was the smallest truck ever made that didn't have "Hot Wheels" stamped on the side. It's true we'd been lost - a bunch. We've had to sleep in the car from time to time. And of course there had been the flat tires, the blown engines, the occasional small fires. Pretty typical stuff. You know, no different than anyone else and certainly nothing which I had the slightest bit of control.
"Babe," I said, "trust me. We're not going to be stranded in the middle of nowhere. We'll take a couple of snacks and call it good. Why, I bet we won't even use those! You'll see, everything will be fine."
I saw an opportunity here, and I went for it.
"You know - and I'm just sayin' - that if we had the UberBitchin' Tote 9000 we could take everything. Ev - Re - Thing." I drug the word out long and slow then inserted a moment of silence for effect. "Just think about that. If we had the UberBitchin' Tote we could take all you desire . . . all you desire and more!
"
This caused her to pause. I saw the conflicting emotions roll over her face like a cold spring wind in a field of wheat. "You are horrible. Absolutely, positively horrible. Do you know that?"
"Sweetie, I'm just looking out for you."
"I seriously doubt that. Listen and listen close. This is the last time I'm going to say this - we, under no circumstances, are buying that Uber thing."
*** the journey continues tomorrow
