By Tiber
My mother Gwen, unlike my father, is a very elegant person. She never eats but, like a plant, if you water her enough, you can keep her forever.
I know she loves all of us children, but I think she was under the impression that after giving birth to us, her job was pretty much done. When she sees any of us, she always has a vaguely surprised expression as if to say,
“Oh, hello, dear. Did you want something else?”
She has only one brother so with six of us, I think a lot of the time, she felt trapped in the middle of a British soccer riot. Many of my early memories of her consist of her exiting a room. Hello, Dr. Freud! My relationships don’t seem to last so maybe I’m just hardwired to feel more normal when a woman’s walking out the door.
Anyway, unsurprisingly, my mother likes Meissen porcelain, handmade soaps, log fires, that sort of thing. But one of her greatest obsessions is…pirates…the classic kind. We have no idea why. From her appearance, it’s not the kind of thing you’d match her up with, well…ever.
Maybe she was married to Captain Morgan in a past life. Maybe she was Captain Morgan. It’s true that even in this life, she’s still one of the few people who can scare Dad.
Sometimes, when it’s time for Happy Hour, Mom will suddenly look up from writing a thank-you note and yell out,
“What ho! It’s time to splice the main brace!”
And it’s nowhere near International Talk Like A Pirate Day.
She used to keep a small skull-and-crossbones flag in her car, which sort of unnerved us when we were little. But now that I think about it, she did always get the best parking spaces.
And come time for our birthdays, we all kept having pirate-themed parties.
“Oh, they were having a sale on eye patches,“ Mom would murmur. (As she drifted out of the room).
It didn’t matter if I or my sisters or my brothers requested “space aliens” or “Cinderella” or “animal” birthday parties, all of them would somehow always morph instead into a pirate party and we’d all end up bearded.
