Zzzt

Have you ever had one of those mornings when you can't get to sleep before 2 a.m. and then you are awakened by someone from a collections agency calling about a bill that should have been paid by Medicaid over a year ago and shouldn't it be illegal for these people to bother you before you've had the chance to have any food or caffeine yet? Yeah.

I do mean to update this thing more often, but so often when I have anything interesting to say, I either lose my ability to type coherently or decide I don't want to deal with other people's reactions. One or the other of those things is something I need to get over. Maybe more caffeine will help.

More fun with bills!

I had thought my phone bill was rather high this time, but even after looking through the charges twice, I didn't see why until today. Remember my technical difficulties last month? Well, apparently my phone decided that the 911 calls were not enough and made 17 calls to directory assistance as well. That's Seventeen. Fortunately, the phone company rep with the Texas accent was very helpful and got the charges dropped for me today. She even had a very sweet "Thank yew" for me at the end of the call, though she was the one who did all the work.

Seventeen 411 calls, at least two 911 calls. I didn't see any long-distance or extra weird charges on that bill, but I still have to wonder who else my phone line was trying to get in touch with last month.

Remembering not remembering

Soon after my father died, after someone had made an offer for all the old Amway tapes the family might want to get rid of, I was sorting through to see which tapes were purely of interest to an Amway fanatic and which might be worth keeping around. One cassette, made in Mexico, with a label on it I no longer recall, I put in the player in case it might be interesting. I listened to the whole thing. Six voices, not counting my own (you could hear toddler-me running around briefly, crying at one point, apparently not old enough for conversations more than two words long).

I recognized the voices of longtime family friends L and R. Also recognized the voices of R2 and M. My father's voice was one I had no difficulty identifying, of course. But the other female voice was unfamiliar to me. Logic told me that that other voice had to be the voice of my mother, but my heart didn't buy the logic. If you had asked me before I listened to that recording whether I remembered what my mother sounded like, I would have said of course I did. I was fourteen when she died! I remembered what my mother sounded like! But, unless the years before she died affected her voice far more than it affected the voices of every other adult in that room, apparently I didn't remember as well as I thought.

That tape is still around someplace. If I listened to it now, I wonder if anyone on it would sound familiar to me at all.

***

No matter how much I do or don't remember her, she's been on my mind lately. For some reason, I remembered today that she was nine years old when she had her first period.* She looked and tried to act much older than her years. There were hints of stories about her going out as a rather young adolescent and flirting with sailors when World War II was just barely over. I wonder what stories she would have told her only daughter that she never told her husband or her sons.

Even if I'm not quite sure who it is I miss, tonight I really miss my mother.


* Not the most delicate way to put it, I know, but it's the way I was thinking of it as I was writing the entry. You can blame the girly hormones. For some reason, until today it didn't occur to me to wonder what was going on in the wider world at the time my mother hit puberty.