My family is late for everything. Rarely, is anyone on time, especially Ada. For decades of my life, getting ready for an event looked like this.
1.) Ada realizes half-way through her Marlboro Red cigarette and cup of brown-watered coffee that she is behind, “Well, this isn’t getting me ready.” Drag. Exhale. Drag.
2.) She puts her make-up on in the bathroom, perched on the toilet with her 5x magnified mirror kissing her face.
3.) She takes a 4-minute bath.
My uncle once told me, “Your mother is the only person I know who puts on her make-up and then bathes.”
4.) She grapples over what “dangly” earrings she should wear and asks for my opinion on what black blazer looks best over her white shirt. All her shirts are white. All her blazers are black. Oddly, this makes my choice seemingly more difficult.
5.) She looks at her watch with a distinct surprise, as if this is the first time it’s ever happened to her before, “Oh man we’re going to be late!”
6.) She rushes out the garage door drilling my dad as he sits in the car with the windows rolled up,
“Did you turn off the coffee pot? You didn’t? Goddamn it, now I’m really going to be late.”
7.) She rushes back into the house in her hurried shuffle-walk.
8.) Frank has been waiting in the car since step 1.
She finally makes it into the car for the 3-block drive to Easter mass. However, this time it was my nephew, Chip, that was running the most behind. (He also decided to get ready the day of my wedding as everyone was leaving to get pictures taken. “Uh, I guess I should have gotten ready earlier.” The hindsight of a teenager… magnanimous.)
“Grandma,” he says in that quick, mumbled, low-registered, I-won’t-even-enunciate-the-word-”blah” kind of speak, “Jesus doesn’t care if we’re late.”
My mom stops searching her purse for Chanel Number 5 to say, “Jesus was NEVER late!”
I’m not sure if I agree with that.
Some folks would:
And then some folks wouldn’t. (Like the questionable romance novels of the fifties, where dialogue about a woman’s passion was a scarlet-red-scandal.)
(Which, by the way, why is this woman not phased at the zombie man, noodling her shoulder with his middle finger? Is God supposed to be a half-dead business man in a suit praying on the sexual repression of a young woman who knows the time? Is he late or is she? Is God pregnant? Or does this picture just show us how much he hates lint? I could go either way. A. God’s pregnant B. God hates a linty shirt)
Back to the story…
Before Chip can rile her up even more with his apathy, she is distracted by a hard candy wrapped in a kleenex, “Here, Bridge, you always need candy in your purse. Like right now. I’m going to faint.”
And Easter begins.
