Answers to Questions

Esereth asked me to answer some good, meaty questions, ones that she has already answered herself over at To Throw Away a Button. So here are my answers:

The last conversation you had with your mother

I talk to my mom every almost every day, so many recent conversations jump to mind. The last mundane conversation I had with her was about logistics for her to pick up O. at school while my old Man and I went to a sonogram appointment. My last interesting conversation with her was me asking her about two different stories about friends of hers I’d been told as a kid. It turns out I had one story completely wrong, and one basically right. The one I had wrong was mildly interesting, but I had somehow totally altered one of the basic details. The one I had right was like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez short story, only set on a bike trip in Nevada.

The last conversation you had with your father

The last conversation I had with my father was the first conversation I’d had with him in more than two years. We talked on the phone for about 40 minutes, and he did 98% of the talking. He mostly talked about Lord of the Rings, which he has been doing supplementary reading on lately and believes is historical rather than fictional. He shared with me that he thinks he might be part elf, and thus could live to be 200. I didn’t challenge him on any of this. He didn’t ask me how I was, though when I mentioned O, he did inquire after him.

I could write a book about my dad, and it would be a funny book and a very sad book. I haven’t written about him on this blog, yet, because a basic explanation of his life history and our relationship in the last six or eight years would take about sixteen posts. But perhaps someday I’ll do a dad series.

Do you regret the person or manner in which you lost your virginity?

No way. It was my first love, we’d been together for two years, had been busily doing “everything but,” and we both felt like it was time. It did kind of suck, unfortunately, because it hurt like hell the first time. (And the second, third, fourth, and fifth.) That was a big disappointment, because I’d pretty much convinced myself that pain on first intercourse was a big myth created to scare girls into keeping their knees closed. Of course, for some women it doesn’t hurt, or not much. But it did for me, oh boy. I shudder to think of what it would have been like if I’d been with some less caring and sensitive person who I wasn’t completely comfortable with.

The thing your parents never found out about.

This has to be a separate question for my mom and my dad, since they never lived together after I was about two. And, truly, I reluctantly admit that as an adolescent I was actually a really good kid and not at all a troublemaker. So I have to go back to my earlier days when I was capable of being a naughty little kid, or to my pre-teen days when I went through a phase of experimenting with being something of a delinquent.

My dad never found out what happened to that pot lid. When I was seven or eight, I used to get up earlier than my dad on the weekends, and this was kind of the golden hour for me, when I could do whatever I wanted as long as I cleaned up the evidence before Dad got up. One Saturday morning I wanted to eat chocolate chip cookies for breakfast, and we had some cookie dough in the fridge. I didn’t know how to turn on the oven (you had to light the pilot every time), but I figured I’d just cook the cookies on the stovetop. For some reason, instead of using a frying pan (merely a bad choice), I chose to set the blobs of cookies dough to cook on a pot lid (a terrible choice). The cookies melted, then burned hopelessly to the lid, and I couldn’t get the blackened cookie dough off the thing. So I just chucked the pot lid to the back of my very messy closet. My dad wondered aloud numerous times what happened to the pot lid, but I kept mum.

My mom never noticed that some of her weed was missing. When I was eleven, I swiped a sizable chunk of my mom’s dope stash out of the glove compartment of her and my stepdad’s VW bus in order to impress my older boy cousins. They were talking about wanting to try pot, and I said I could get some. So I rolled us a giant Cheech and Chong doobie. (I used two, maybe three rolling papers. Obviously it was my very first attempt at joint rolling.) We “smoked” it behind the A & P, though I doubt I really inhaled. (I didn’t get high in any case.) As far as I know, my Mom and stepdad didn’t notice that their stash had been lightened. But it was an old school 1979 bag of weed, I would guess a full ounce or so, so they probably never missed it.

How much do you spend a month on groceries?

About $500.

The last lie you told.

I claimed that my the big revelation I had to make on my blog was “too strange, too complex, too unforeseen” for anyone to guess what it was, because I figured if I didn’t throw people off a bit they’d just guess right away what the real news is (that I’m pregnant). But then as soon as I read the first comment, where DoctorMama was like “What? What? I can’t guess!” I felt guilty and had to comment and admit that it wasn’t really all that strange or unforeseen. And then some anonymous commenter totally guessed the real news. Ah well, I’m a terrible liar.

How often are your comments on other blogs made out of obligation?

Very rarely, actually. I’m a talker. I tend to blurt things out just to fill silences. I will leave a four minute message on your voicemail. I was always the kid in class with my hand in the air. I was voted “most talkative” my senior year. Back in the late nineties, my New Year’s resolution for several years running was “Talk less, listen more.”

I always seem to have something to say wherever I am, and the comment box is no exception.

(This basic fact of my personality makes my answer to the second question even sadder. And it’s been true for years: when I talk to my dad on the phone, it’s monologue on his end and mostly silence on mine.)