Word To Your Mother

How many times do you have to do something before it becomes a tradition? For the past few years, my family has gone to Chili's for Mother's Day. We go around three o'clock when it isn't too crowded. We took my grandmother the first time. She ordered fajitias, but it turned out she thought she was ordering hard shelled tacos. Actually, she thinks anything remotely Mexican-sounding comes with a hard-shelled taco. So she was a little disappointed with the warm, soft pita bread sitting in front of her. I don't think she can eat a hard taco anyway. Her front tooth falls out every other week and she keeps paying a dentist to put it back in. That's bound to get expensive after a while, I think I'd either go to a better dentist or just wedge a Chicklet into my gums and pretend it's a tooth. Before we left, she wrapped a green jalapeno in some Kleenex and put it in her purse. She said she'd eat it later.

This year she didn't go because she just got over a cold and she didn't want to catch it again. But my mom still called her up to wish her a happy Mother's Day, which sounded like this:

"Hello, happy Mother's Day."

"Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?

"HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!!"

So this time it was just my parents, my brothers, Michele and Brianna. Well, and me, obviously. While we were waiting for our meal, we got into a discussion about the rich history of the fried onion centerpiece/appetizer. Michele used to work at the Outback Stakehouse, which she says came out with the "Bloomin' Onion" first. Then Chili's unveiled the "Awesome Blossom," and the next thing you know everyone's got their own deep fried onion snack. My brothers and I decided that if we ever opened a restaurant, our version would be called the "Friggin' Onion."

We started talking about Glenn's upcoming prom. He's going with some girl he barely knows. He just went to a dance last week with a different girl, and he didn't know her, either. What the heck is that all about? It's all pre-arranged by his friends, like "This Mary. You Like Mary. She good dancer." I'm not sure how well that worked in print, but it was funny in my head. It just seems weird to find someone to go with just for the sake of going, but then I didn't even go to my prom. I spent the night playing Mario 64 and listening to an old Lynyrd Skynryd concert on WZLX. Anyway, he said he didn't really know her, but she's Emo. She's Emo? What the hell does that mean?

What followed was a lengthy conversation about Emo kids, but all I got out of it was that Emo stands for Emotional. It sounds more like a psychiatrist's diagnosis than a teenage subculture. According to Glenn, they actually don't appear to display any emotion whatsoever, except through depressing poems. He even had a drawing in his sketchbook of a "Tickle Me Emo" doll. As far as I can tell, Emo kids are just Goth kids who've discovered color. Kids these days.

I guess I had my own little depressing poem phase, but I offset it with doodles of bunnies and skulls in the margins of all my notebooks. But the thought of my youngest brother being days away from graduating high school just might set it off again. Glenn will be 18 next month. That is so depressing.

I remember one summer we were sitting in church near one of the air conditioning units and Glenn's nose started running. My grandmother sifted through her purse, looking for a tissue for him. She always seems to have a handful of tissues in there, along with a box of white Tic Tacs with one lodged in sideways so you have to bang it a couple of times to pop it free. She handed him a bunched-up tissue but before he used it, he opened it up to see why it was so lumpy. It was the damn jalapeno!

By the way, I've now had over 10,000 hits on this site since February. It doesn't seem possible, since there's only four or five people that ever leave any comments. So what's the deal with the rest of you? What, you're too good to write something? It only takes a couple of seconds to write "LOL" or one of those sideways smiley faces. Slackers.