Baiting the hook

My mother has come and gone, and the house is a little bit emptier -- and cleaner -- as a result. Our last-minute, desperate cleaning of the townhouse paid off, to our mutual benefit. It helps that our new living arrangements are not in the ghetto, and not of a type to raise eyebrows in police officers or Child Protective Services. Barring the uniform and generic cookie-cutter nature of any townhouse community, it is, in short, a vast improvement over my old place, which Mom has been convinced for years would eventually get us killed. The old apartment's managers could put up a sign saying "Featured on COPS," and it would be a draw to prospective tenants. About the only excitement imaginable in our new neighborhood would be if someone painted his front door something other than white. Gasp. Shock. Horror. World coming to an end.

You get the picture. Anyway, so Mom approved of the new place. Barring an incident during which she Cloroxed my sink and scrubbed it back to its original factory condition, she managed to repress her more urgent cleaning instincts.

One of the great things about visiting with Mom is that she invariably gives me some hilarious family story to pass on to the rest of you. It's true that many of these stories are ones that I've heard before, but the mind is an impermanent thing, mine more than most. Though dim shadows of the original tales linger somewhere in the recesses of my brain, they require reinforcement and repetition to take.

We were sitting in a small greek gyro house in Mountain View, waiting for our falafel and gyro wraps to be made, and Mom noticed some pictures on the wall of Greece, which she'd visited in her pre-married days. In 1970, she made a solitary trip around the world, backpacking at random. My sister comes by her wanderlust honestly, which Mom will admit when she's not feeling particularly vexed by Sako's inability to settle down and live a normal life.

Mom regaled me with stories of her Mediterranean trip, and right around the time we got our food, had moved on to visiting diamond factories in Holland. "I saw a black diamond," she said, "and I thought, this one I can buy because it was very small. So I bought a ring and sent it to your grandmother. She was so happy. She treasured it for years, but eventually it fell out and she lost it."

My grandfather was a doctor and a graduate of Todai, Tokyo University. His engagement to my grandmother was through a matchmaker, an omiai encounter. When they were engaged, my grandmother apparently was expecting to get an engagement ring. Days passed and my grandfather made no mention of one, so she finally just asked him.

My grandfather (or so goes the story) was incredulous. "Don't talk such nonsense," he said. "I've already caught the fish. Why would I want to bait the hook?"

I suppose there are more tactless ways to begin a happy married life, but I can't think of them off-hand. It just goes to show that more than one culture has its own version of the masculine, "Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?" saying. Also, that men can be sort of stupid.

It was with that story in mind that my Mom bought her mother the diamond ring. The conversation veered around to wedding rings. She wears hers now that she's a widow, though she never wore it when my dad was alive. She inspected it while we walked into the parking lot. "It keeps away trouble," she told me complacently. "I have already been married. I do not need more men, thank you."

I laughed. It's difficult to think of mothers as having romance problems, though it occasionally -- dimly, mind -- occurred to my sister and me more than once that an awful lot of men seemed to be a little in love with Mom. "Has there been trouble?" I asked, tactlessly.

Mom looked reproachful. "Not my trouble. I did not make it. Yuuuuuuuuuuuhri," she said. "Your mother is also a woman."

Well. I suppose she is.