odds & ends

Mom's birthday was this past Friday. A week or so beforehand, feeling vaguely pressured into getting her some sort of present, I signed her up for a wine club membership online. What with her going through labor, painful surgery -- "My hips are too small," she told her daughters complacently in one memorable, horrific night of sharing. "They cutting from here to here, all the way across. Almost they are making me into two Mamas!" -- and wasting thirty years of her life in raising a pair of aerosol cans without environmental warning labels, I felt some sort of token was required.

I might have mentioned this before, but Mom likes wine. A glass of red every night; it actually lowers her blood sugar, which is a good thing, though I'm pretty sure there aren't a lot of doctors out there who'd recommend it as a primary response to elevated glucose levels. One glass (or maybe two) a night, and that's usually enough to get her completely buzzed. You don't know hilarious until you've seen my little Tweety Bird mother tipsy. Her eyes get all round and shiny. Her poofy head wobbles. She kicks her feet and notices the obvious with all the excitement of a first discovery. "Yuhri, you are so short next to your sister." Basically, she becomes the intellectual equivalent of a hedgehog.

She also starts tasting things. Stains. Pools of unidentified liquid. She'll discover something shrivelled and cryptic sitting on the counter, wrinkle her brow over it, wonder, "What is this?" and before anybody can stop her, nibble. Not that this is relevant. I just thought I'd, you know. Fill in some details.

By some fluke, the cool people at K&L Wines managed to deliver her new booty exactly on time, despite the fact that I hadn't bothered to mention in the order when her birthday was. She called me up, chirpy as a Tamagochi, to announce that we were "Soooo funny." She chortled and chuckled to herself on the phone, an appreciative audience at her own one-woman comedy show. "Your present, I am laughing and laughing . . ."

"Why?"

"It is so hi-la-rious," she pronounced. The woman can't remember the word for 'table,' but she can use 'hilarious' correctly? "I laughing and I laughing and Paula says, it is very creative gift, she has never seeing before, and she laughing too."

I paused to consider this. Maybe she hadn't quite got it? "It's not a gag gift, Mom. You can actually drink it, you know. It's real wine."

"Yes. Funny. Ha ha ha ha!"

This was obviously some sort of generational or cultural disconnect. There isn't much you can say when a person receives a gift of wine with a: "Funny, ha ha! I am laughing and laughing!" My personal suspicion was that she tried on her gift before she called me, just to see if her head fit through the hole.

My sister headed out for Panama today, pickled in a van she bought with her boyfriend for $2,000 from a random stranger who threatened them with violence when they counter-offered. Four of them -- Sako, her boyfriend, their friend and his girlfriend -- will be spending the next two months driving an erratic and potentially inconclusive route down to Panama, after which they'll return to the Bay Area for Christmas.

I'm sorry. Did I say Sako and her boyfriend? Did I mention she broke up with him a week before the trip? "We're postponing the actual breakup until after the trip is over," she explained cheerfully over a lunch at the Neiman Marcus Rotunda in San Francisco. "It's for the best. He wants things like marriage and kids, and I want to join the Peace Corps."

"You have to have a college degree to join the Peace Corps."

"I'll graduate from college. . ."

"You're ten years into a four year bachelor's degree program. You haven't taken a class since 2002."

". . . someday."

Right. Dear Abby. My sister. . .

The original trip was intended to take them down to Chile, for a span of six months. "But everyone wants to go back home for Christmas," she told me deprecatingly, "so we're coming back in between. We've already got our first job," she added.

"Job?"

"Picking coffee beans in El Salvador." Her eyes lit up. "25 cents per hundred pounds."

Even by her standards, this was not commensurate renumeration. "Is that technically a paying job?"

"That's what they pay coffee pickers down in El Salvador," she informed, and hastened on when I started getting visibly disgruntled on behalf of El Salvadorean coffee pickers. "You can get by on 25 cents in El Salvador. It's cheap down there."

"I dare you to get by on 25 cents. I dare you."

"It's really cheap."

"I suppose, if you're living in your van."

"Well, we have a place to live, too," she admitted. "John's aunt owns the coffee plantation, and we can stay there, except she won't let us stay without a bodyguard so she's hired one--"

I regurgitated half my glass of water. "Sorry. What? Bodyguard? What? What? Did you say bodyguard?"

"His aunt's a little paranoid."

Golly. Imagine that. And now so am I.