In Which MoM Arrives

Mother of Mossy, a.k.a. MoM, arrived for the holidays Tuesday night. The Amtrak train was--are you sitting, Gentle Reader?--early. Early!  Not on time, which it has never been the 22 years I've lived here, but early, forty minutes early, in fact. I'm still gobsmacked over the whole early thing, three days later. It's a good thing I'm sitting.

The Hotel across the street from the train depot has a hip and trendy club in it, and the swinging twenty-somethings were all playing some kind of trivia game with a real emcee from the club. Mr. Big and I (Mr. Big always comes to the train station with me; he likes an outing) stood on the sidewalk opposite, playing along in my little head. I guess it's not fair for an over-educated, middle-aged woman who likes to read to play these kinds of games, even in her mind, against a patio of somewhat tipsy college students because there was only one possible outcome: there was only one question I didn't know. There were lots of long, silent gaps as the emcee waited for someone to answer the trivia question, and I'd be silently saying the answer over and over, hoping someone would pull that answer out of the ether, and then he'd finally move on. Not that my fellow citizens are dumb, mind you, but 10 o'clock on a Tuesday evening may not bring out the smart drinkers and clubbers, especially when many college papers are due this week before the Thanksgiving break. (I hope that sentence magically and psychically flits it way across cyberspace into the heads of my A 4XX students--disguised to protect the innocent--, whose paper is due next week, the night before Thanksgiving. Harsh, you say? Oh, but Gentle Reader, I cancelled class that night so no one has to hang around for an evening class the night before Thanksgiving. I'm not a completely heartless professor. Only partially heartless.)

After spending weeks last year telling me that the Honda Element was ugly, MoM told me how wonderful it was halfway through the ten minute ride to my home. Shades of her first Georgie impression, also at long distance and also without actually having seen him, who she thought was the ugliest cat and "why would I adopt him, he's ugly." Until he spent 3 months with her cat, Bo, while I was out of the country and he and Bo had a grand old time chasing each other around her house, hiding behind furniture and then jumping out to pounce on each other, followed by Georgie snuggling into her lap for a nap, and then her tune changed to  "You know, George and Bo get along so well, you should just leave him here when you go back to graduate school. He's so handsome and sweet and loving." Like MoM, I appear to be always right, so I'm not sure why she doesn't believe me in the first place when I tell her something. (insert cheesy snarky wink here, Reader)  Really, world, I would be a kind and benevolent despot who was always right. Just give in.

Ugly, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.