This is my favorite Christmas decoration, Maudie the Elf. She was originally an outrageous amount of money, $80-something, and I paid half price. This was YEARS ago, pre-Mick, pre-kids, even pre-Alaska. Purchased during that brief period in my life when I lived in Pendleton, Oregon. I know we are not supposed to love material things, that to do so makes one very shallow. So just call me shallow. I love this elf. And it is really difficult to keep her on her feet, like she's been in the grown-up eggnog.
Tonight was one of those nights when I just stopped and had an OMG! I'm-too-tired-to-write moment. But I'll try. One of the reasons for this fatigue is that I actually exercised when I got home tonight. Not only did I exercise, but it was Bob's Boot Camp, the Biggest Loser DVD from last season. Tough. But since I didn't exercise on Friday nor Saturday NOR Sunday (disgusting sloth), plagued by guilt and self-disgust and the proximity of too many mirrors, I sucked it up and sweated it out. Fifty minutes. Big whoop.
The second reason was, because even though we have caller ID, since I was already feeling plagued by guilt, I answered the phone when the caller ID came up as Gladys Neville. Let me explain. Anyone who has ever spoken to Gladys on the phone needs no explanation--they will only commiserate. Gladys Neville is the last surviving member of my biological family, the twin to my birth-mother Phyllis.
Gladys is nuts. Probably not officially or medically or however those things are actually classified. But in layman's terms, in reality, NUTS. Gladys is a shut-in, a woman of almost 64 years with a mouth that would make a trucker blanche. All 80 melodramatic pounds of her. Gladys is not short, or didn't use to be. In fact, she used to be about a half inch taller than me, if she can be believed. Cruel, cruel gravity...and time.
Gladys has MS. Part of the nutso stuff can be attributed to that. Some of it is, as mentioned, life-long melodrama. The rest of it is being a shut-in. Gladys' captive audiences are held captive on the phone, her main means of connecting with the outside world. Gladys doesn't have a computer. She'd like one, but there is absolutely no room in her house for one at this moment. Conversations with Gladys are punctuated with her talking to her cat, long, drawn-out monologues (rants) about how unappreciative the cat is and how inconsiderate the cat is for causing the MASSES of catalogs, books, and other mail to cascade down onto the floor from whatever precarious pile she'd created. Gladys lives in a maze of stacked piles of mail and other crap. You know those messy house programs on TV? Remember Monk's brother Ambrose, the shut-in, and his collection of newspapers? That's almost Gladys, but too organized. But back to the annoying part, talking to the cat while you wait on the other line for your conversation to continue, not really caring what the cat does or if its considerate, appreciative or not. If that was a tedious paragraph to read, imagine talking to the woman for TWO HOURS!
Because that is what she usually does to us, not realizing (or perhaps not caring) that we need to do other things than talk on the phone for two hours--like FEED OUR CHILDREN, GO TO WORK, OR POSSIBLY SLEEP! To which Gladys would reply that we were inconsiderate.
I'm very lucky to have the family that I do. In fact, I'm much luckier than Gladys because I do have more family. I have the family that raised me and loved me. The family that I think of as "My Family". Then I have my little family, my own dear little family that I'd longed for all my life and finally got, warts and all. I also have my husband's family, and yes, they do feel like my family. And I have Gladys.
And Gladys has me. Just me.
Actually she has Mick, too, and frankly, would rather talk with him than with me, but she only has him because of me. She has me and my little family. That's a pretty small family.
Gladys is both fascinating and horrifying--a cautionary tale. But she is a part of me, a part of my life, and once in awhile when I'm either feeling exceedingly virtuous, masochistic, or inebriated, I pick up the phone and get ready for the phone marathon.
Tonight, she probably only spoke to me for about 30 minutes. Did she take pity on me? Was she brief because we'd spoken twice in the past week? Or maybe I was tedious. One could only hope.
In any case, in virtuous exhaustion, not the least bit inebriated, I'm ready to fall into bed with the foul odor of bulldog farts floating in the air (man, that Costco dog food is the WORST!) I will rest up for the next Gladys "conversation".
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