“Believe in her, dad. Believe in Grandma Evie.” My daughter — just 5 years old — was pleading with me. Sounded like a line from a bad baseball movie.
It was 86+ degrees in my mother’s house. After a rainstorm. A temperature she would dispute using complex physics and something about the silver in the China cabinet causing things to heat up by the thermostat.
“That thing isn’t right,” she said. I had been complaining about how hot it was inside. Had walked over to the digital thermostat to read it. To prove that it was hot. Which would explain the sweat on my kid’s brow and why she was fanning herself.
My mother doesn’t use her air conditioning. Thinks it’s a scourge. Calls once a quarter to tell me that I need to get used to life without it myself. Because the economy is crap, the energy is in crisis and soon we’ll all be AC-less. Her words not mine. She’s been saying it my whole life.
I warn her: “Mom, people will give up their front teeth, their left foot, both kidneys … but they will never give up their AC. We may never cure cancer, but we will always find a way to cool ourselves.”
I digress. “Believe in her, dad. Believe in Grandma Evie,” my daughter told me.
My wife and I were picking her up. We had left her at my mother’s house for the afternoon while we went out.
And you must understand the surreal situation. And why a statement like that could mean almost anything. Because here is a house where you’re invited over to watch cats who come racing in from all corners of the house to watch a toilet flush. You would think some feline Messiah was rising up out of the pipes!
And this is a house where I’m told back porch steps need to be widened because (and I quote … I wrote it down in my reporter’s notebook), “Sundae (her dog) and I can’t fit down the steps together.”
Why do you need to fit together? No, never ask a question like that. Not of my mother. Not in a house like this. It will bring on a long answer involving physics and silver in the China cabinet, and for some inexplicable reason, an energy crisis that will take away our precious AC.
Leave it be.
“Believe in her?” I asked my daughter dumbfounded as I walked around that “Alice in Wonderland” house — the Cheshire cats magically appearing and disappearing in front of the toilet, the intricately laid out tea parties — complete with place cards and 17 courses worth of silverware. This was a mystical, magical place. All topsy-turvy and upside down. Normal people can’t come to terms with it. Can’t grasp what’s going on. Only children can.
Believe? It was over a giant spider and a web that could trap an airplane. My daughter led me outside to see.
A banana spider in the front yard — his web perched between the screen door and a rosebush, out of the way. Not near anything. But I will admit he was big.
“See?” my mother said. “You have to move him. He might bite me when I’m over there pruning that rose.”
That was too much for me. I turned on my heals and loaded up to go home.
There was already a message on the machine when we got there: “Brian! Call me back. It’s kind of important.”
I knew it wasn’t important, but called back anyway.
My mother: “Did you ever think the reason they call it a banana spider is because they’re not indigenous to Florida? They come to Florida in our bananas and are now eating all of our native bugs?”
Somewhere inside of my brain circuits burned out.
I told my daughter about this conversation. “Oh dear,” she said, concerned — because she got it. “Oh DEAR!”
She didn’t say it, but I know what she was thinking. “Believe in her, dad. Believe in Grandma Evie!”