madness of mom

The Guy, who has an undeveloped -- and therefore dangerous -- sense of humor, directed my mother towards my journal on the first day of her visit. I was busy in my recliner, working through email. The first I knew of it was my Mom's piping question to the Guy.

"Why the mushrooms?"

"I don't know," quoth he. "You should ask her."

"I like mushrooms," I said absent-mindedly, then refocused and looked up to discover my Mom and my fiance colluding together over a laptop. Not, shall we say, a picture to delight the eyes. "What're you talking about?"

"Yuhri keeps a web journal," the treacherous Guy told Mom, blithely indifferent to the whirlwind of potential consequences. "She writes these articles and posts them online so everybody can read them. She has some great stories about you."

Fortunately, One-Track-Mind Mom was still fixated on the fungus. "They're poisonous mushrooms," she told me.

"I don't care."

Said Mom to the Guy, wide-eyed, "She wanting maybe to kill everybody."

She did not follow through and actually read the journal. The Guy has been allowed to keep his testicles.

***

A week at Mom's house in Seattle, and two days back in California with Mom as a visitor.

Stories? I have stories. Gather 'round, y'all.

***

Mom and my sister came to pick us up in the Toyota Previa, a goliath of a van that has been in our family now for 13 years. It was Dad's purchase, back when; I've spoken before about his fascination for road trips. The Previa was the culmination of those years of dreaming, the ultimate incarnation of the family road trip vehicle. Whatever its purpose, it never had a chance to fulfill it. A few years later he died of lung cancer, without ever having had a chance of driving it cross country.

As the vehicle for a single woman, it is eminently impractical. Mom holds onto it anyway, motivated as much by sentiment as by a reluctance to buy another car. I've mentioned this before, but in her college days she studied under Dr. Suzuki with a young man named Koji Toyoda, nicknamed “Ko-chan.” The real Ko-chan is now in his sixties at least, and president of the Talent Education Research Institute, an eminent figure in the circles of musical pedagogy.

Out in Bellevue, he's an ancient, puttering corpse of a car. It isn't too far a leap from “Toyoda” to “Toyota.”

I checked the odometer while Mom puttered happily down the highway at a consistent 60 miles an hour. Tiny old women who could barely see over their steering wheels zipped past us with ruthless impatience. “How many miles are on this car now?”

Mom peered at the mileage. The van slowly drifted off the road. “179,680.”

“Wow. Isn't it time you got a new car?”

Mom made severe shushing sounds at me, finger pressed to lips and all. “No no, don't worry. She was just joking.” She patted the steering wheel tenderly.

“Who are you talking to?”

“It was just a joke. She didn't mean it,” she cooed at the car. “Yuhri, you hurt Ko-chan's feelings.”

“170,000 miles, Mom. It's about time.”

“You work so hard for me. There there. Ko-chan is my favorite.”

The car was doing an ominous stuttering thing the entire way home, occasionally catching on the brake in a burst of hiccups before scooting on again for a few more feet. To be completely honest, I can't be positive it wasn't my Mom's driving.

***

The trip was ostensibly (at least in Mom's eyes) a vacation for us. How it is that vacations automatically translate to "chores, errands, and work" is still a mystery to me.

We had one day of peace and quiet, after which Mom decided that we had rested enough. The Guy fixed the stove and redid the plumbing in the upstairs bathroom. Me? A hundred little errands and tasks she'd been saving up for the last six months, just for me.

"What else happened at Mom's place that was funny?"

"I don't remember," mumbled the Guy. "I've blocked it out of my memory."

It was educational for the Guy, if nothing else. He is now thoroughly intimate with the inner mysteries of a toilet, and has hands-on experience in how to replace a sink. And Mom loves him.

"She make a old woman, oh, so happy," she enthused.

Mom has a tenuous grasp on pronouns. "He, Mom. He."

She was unrepentant. "Make me so happy, so nice."

There was much loud banging, and the sound of the Guy swearing with some enthusiasm came floating down the stairs. Mom beamed.

***

That first evening, after a day's rest and relaxation, I went with the Guy to pick my sister up from work. Mom's car, we discovered, was not Seattle-friendly. It had also heard what I'd said to Mom about finding a new car. Should have remembered about the Japanese, that they know how to hold a grudge.

We met Sako at Uwajimaya, a massive Japanese grocery near the new Safeco arena. We invited her to drive us home. "Yeah, Yuhri's not comfortable driving it."

Except neither, it turned out, was Sako. She spun us onto the freeway with no difficulty, only to suffer some sort of mental spasm a few miles later when we approached a ramp separated from the main road by a concrete divider.

I watched the concrete divider approach us at 65 miles an hour while my sister chewed happily on one of the pastries we'd bought at the store. Fifteen feet away, she looked up and made a split-second decision. We weren't going to take the ramp. We were going to go that-a-way.

With a hard yank on the steering wheel she sent us leaping like a startled fish into the main road. In the rear passenger seat, the Guy screamed like a girl. Me? I squeaked “HOLY SHIT!!!” and wrenched great chunkfuls of flesh out of my thigh with both hands.

Sako made a sheepish little clucking sound. “Oops.” I hate that. I hate 'oops.' I especially hate 'oops' when someone else is driving. The Guy was gibbering and clutching desperately at his bag of shrimp chips. The Previa was purring to itself, like a satisfied cat. My sister added thoughtfully, “I suppose now would be a good time to mention I don't have a license.”

No, not really.

***

Mom has been making grape vodka in the backyard.

No, really. Grape vodka.

Many years ago, on some sort of whim, my green thumbed mother planted four vines in the backyard. "Japanese grapes," she calls them. They're called Japanese grapes because they're a breed that happens to grow in Japan. Here in the US, they call them Concord grapes.

"Oh, that's nice," says Mom. "They have Japanese grapes in Concord. Where is Concord?"

Like pretty much any plant that has met my mother, the grape vines began growing like they had something to prove. Now they sprawl over any stable structure near enough to attract their attention; each year they grow fat, juicy, sweet-sour bunches the size of a grown man's head. "I cannot eat them all," Mom pointed out. "And birds, they eat so much, they become very fat. And also the squirrels, they eat, but still so much, and so waste."

So she makes grape vodka. Actually, what she does is take the extra grapes, drop them in a gallon of vodka, and then forget about them for a year. The end result isn't so much grape vodka, I guess, as it is ... vodka grapes.

Are they potent?

"I think I blacked out a minute after eating one," quoth my sister, the lush.

"What did you do with the rest of them?" I asked Mom.

She looked puzzled. "Rest of what?"

***

After dinner one night, Mom announced that she had something to show us. "Stay here," she ordered. Obedient, the Guy and Sako and I remained perched at the kitchen table while she trotted off.

She padded back with a giant greenish-yellow citrus of some sort, which she placed in the middle of the table. She sat down.

We inspected the fruit. "What is it?"

"It's a po....plum....."

"It's not a plum."

But Mom was still trying. "Plumato. Plorella."

"Pomelo?"

"Pumelo." Mom was agreeable. She added, "I got from Anna."

There was a long moment of silence while we stared at it. There was a distinct feeling that we were expected to comment on it somehow. After all, Mom had said it was something she wanted to "show" us. The word "eat" hadn't entered into the conversation at all.

"It's big," Sako suggested by way of an opener.

The Guy and I agreed sycophantically. "Really big."

"And green," the Guy offered, his inspiration for the moment.

We all agreed that it was green.

"And yellowy."

Yes, it was yellowy. A pensive hush fell over the room.

Sako added, "It's sort of like a pumpkin."

"A Christmas pumpkin?"

"It's a fruit."

"A fruity Christmas pumpkin."

"That isn't a pumpkin."

"A fruity Christmas fake pumpkin."

"We could make a Jack-o-Lantern out of it."

"A fruity Christmas fake Jack-o-Lantern?"

"I don't think it's a Jack-o-Lantern if it's not Halloween."

"Sant-o-Lantern."

"Sant-o-urn."

"Santorum!"

I giggled. Mom wanted to know why. "Never mind."

Meanwhile, my sister had produced a permanent ink marker from somewhere and was drawing a face on the pomelo. She turned the fruit to display it to us. We admired it in silence. Mom confiscated the marker and added some details. In very short order, the entire Hirata family was busily engaged in the decoration of the pomelo. The Guy, finding this bizarre, retrieved his camera and took a picture.

"Do you want to eat it?" Mom asked after the decorating was done. Poor timing on her part. The Hirata children can anthropomorphize anything.

"It has a face."

"Four faces."

"And glasses."

"You can't eat a fruit with glasses," Sako said self-righteously. "It's not fair."

***

To be continued . . .

Posted by yhirata at January 4, 2004 4:09 PM