My mother argues with dead people. The last time I saw her she gave her brother-in-law an earful, which wasn’t very effective since he’s been dead for seven years.
As I’ve said, my mother has a temper. It’s like a flash flood or a twister. Both are generally aberrations during excellent weather, like the price to pay for enjoying a good climate. And you know how people love my mother - like Sooners love the prairie.
For my mother, there’s an argument for everyone, as if anger is her gift to the world. But like an idiot savant, it is not something within her control. It simply takes over, like a visit from the Holy Ghost. Or, think epilepsy - only you do the opposite when it comes to biting your tongue. And like an epileptic, she can never remember a thing. She’ll announce that so and so is mad at her, but she has no idea why. What did you say to them? I ask. Nothing, she answers. I didn’t say a thing.
My mother thinks of the afterlife as an endless Christmas Eve with everybody over at her mother’s house. Her father is in the basement, which isn’t hell so much as the place where he goes to talk business. In heaven, God is down there too, chewing the fat with Pop. My mother is at the table playing cards, arguing with her sisters. Her brothers are still in Purgatory but expected any minute, and every cousin is around the corner, even if they live in California, or heaven’s equivalent. They’ll all be over for homemade ravioli tomorrow, if tomorrow ever comes.
I visited her at her new apartment in New Jersey, where she moved this year. It’s called Cardinal Village, which is a step up from The Bishopric. It’s possible to live a full life there and never go outside, like a space station with the astronauts suspended in walkers. My mother entered that place like she was selling oxygen and expected to make a killing.
In Cardinal Village, you can tell the same joke to fifty people, one at a time, and then start all over again, no laugh diminished. Within three months, my mother was on the Board. Considering her general outlook, Cardinal Village is like heaven’s vestibule. They call her the Pope, and like the Pope, who sees all people as Catholics, my mother doesn’t see old people as old, or dead people as dead. Everyone looks immortal to her. No one is spared her humor, none her rage.
