This Isn't Shrimp Remoulade

My mother has a skill for stating the inobvious. Meaning, she has a knack for saying something that contradicts what the rest of us know to be perfectly obvious. I have, at times, wondered how she developed this ability. Did she practice? Was she born with it? If it was genetic, is it a recessive or dominant trait? If I had a child, would I have to genetically test the mother beforehand to make sure that we didn't pass the gene on to the baby?

When I was very young, I promised my mother that, should she manage to turn 65, I would take her to Europe as a reward. I only vaguely remembered this until, as my mother approached 65, she reminded me. I seized upon the opportunity. My other brothers, both older, had maintained during my childhood that I was adopted (being the only blonde in a family of brunettes) and that, unlike them, I wouldn't amount to much. Well, by sixteen my brilliant golden hair had turned dark chestnut (which is the reason I abandoned my faith in God) and by the time my mother brought up the subject of the promised trip to Europe, I was flush with cash from a recent stock option buy-out during the Internet Bubble. My brothers, crippled by disappointing jobs, could not compete. It was my chance to point out that not only was I the only one of my siblings to never have been arrested, but that I was also the only one fully capable of sweeping her off to Europe, all-expenses paid.

During the '90s, my mother suffered a series of personal ups and downs, mostly downs, and mostly forced upon her. In the early part of the decade, she met and married a fine new husband, a sweet Texas Good Ol' Boy named Ralph. Ralph was an author (he had written, among other things, 101 Things to Do With a Texas Cowpatty), minister, and thrice made-and-lost millionaire, a jovial, imperfect man whom my mother adored. She married him at a JP in Podunk, Texas, we're I got to meet my new step-brothers and sisters for the first time. It was the wildest thing my mother had ever done in her life, or so I thought. I was proud of her.

After their marriage, they settled in Dallas. The Brain and I saw them often, and one dinner stands out in particular. She ordered shrimp remoulade, a sort of cajun shrimp cocktail, and when presented with a beautiful example of said appetizer exclaimed, "This isn't shrimp remoulade!"

The waiter, taken somewhat aback, replied, "I assure you, ma'am, it is."

My mother was not deterred. "This isn't shrimp remoulade. I was here not 4 days ago and I ordered shrimp remoulade and this is not what I ordered."

The waiter stood his ground. "Ma'am, I don't know what you ordered 4 days ago, but if you ordered shrimp remoulade, then I assure you, this is what you got."

At this point, I decided I would try to rescue the situation. "Mother," I said, "perhaps you ordered the fried shrimp appetizer before."

She glared at me. I held my hands up in polite surrender.

The waiter persisted. "Ma'am, if you want, I'll take this back to the kitchen and get you whatever you want." At this, my mother turned somewhat petulant and waved the man away.

"No," she said, "I'll eat this...this whatever it is." As the waiter turned to leave she muttered "This isn't shrimp remoulade."

The Brain and I exchanged glances, each of us wondering if perhaps my mother had gone mad. My mother picked at the "isn't shrimp remoulade", claiming to having lost her appetite entirely from the stress of the ordeal. She refused to order an entree and sat glowering at me, the Brain, and Ralph while we consumed our blackended snappers and whole fried catfish.

The moment to order dessert arrived, and the waiter asked me what I wanted. I replied I would be satisfied with a creme brulee (at the time, creme brulee was the hot dessert in Dallas). My mother, who had starved herself from pique during dinner, chirped up, "Oh, yes! I would like a creme brulee, too!" The waiter nodded, taking an order of espresso from the Brain and cake from Ralph.

When the waiter returned and set the creme brulee -- a perfect creme brulee -- down in front of my mother, she glared at it, at me, at it again, and then the waiter. The waiter, having decided that my mother was certainly someone best avoided and ignored, blythely left the table. She tapped at the burnt sugar crust on her dessert.

Then she muttered, "This isn't creme brulee."

Astonished, I said, "Mother, please describe creme brulee to me."

She pursed her lips in thought for a moment while Ralph dug into his cake and the Brain watched, his face impassive but his mind infinitely amused. "Well," she began, "it's like espresso, but with milk in it." I tried to explain to her that, contrary to her description, creme brulee was not a coffee drink with milk in it, but was in fact a custard topped with burnt sugar, but she refused the explanation. Gallantly, the Brain traded his espresso for her creme brulee, and my mother left the restaurant satisfied, but starving.

Within a few weeks, Ralph suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed on his left side and unable to say anything except for "shit!" and "goddamn!" and "Jesus Christ!". He obviously had complete comprehension, but had, quite simply, lost the ability to say anything except for the Seven Dirty Words and their assorted kin. The Brain, who had studied linguistics, was happy to inform anyone exposed to Ralph that these words were not only treated unfairly by the world at large, but apparently lived in some word ghetto in a different part of the brain from the rest of the words. Like cockroaches after the nuclear holocaust, they had survived the stroke which destroyed the parts of the brain where the other, happy words lived, leaving Ralph with only "shit-goddamn!-Jesus Christ!" and the other handful of curses for vocabulary.

My mother tried valiantly to care for Ralph, but at the same time, my Great Aunt Margaret was diagnosed with a neural disease that was simply eating her brain out from the inside. About the same time, it became apparent that her father and mother had managed to grow old and infirm as well. In one fell swoop, she moved the entire flock of them to Austin, settling herself, Ralph and my grandparents in a retirement village and placing my aunt in a nursing home nearby.

Ralph survived about two years after the stroke. In the end, I decided that he had been driven mad by the inability to articulate anything. To him, something as simple as "I'm hungry!" came out "Argh, Piss-shit! Argh!" For a man who had lived by words as an author, minister, and business man, I could only imagine it was absolutely and utterly devastating to his sense of self. Ralph descended into curse-laden dementia and passed away.

Soon thereafter, my aunt also died, and within a year or two, my grandfather passed away as well from diabetes. My mother was beaten until she remembered that promise I'd made her so long ago.

"Of course I remember!" I said, "I'll make the arrangements right away." The dates were picked and the Brain and I managed to get four weeks off from work to take my mother and a friend of her choosing to Europe. She selected Madge, her high-school best friend. We sent them guidebooks and tips for traveling in Europe, made all the arrangements, and booked first class tickets on Virgin Airlines.

If you ever have a chance to fly first class (ahem, upper class) on Virgin Airlines to Europe, by all means do so. Suffice it to say that compared to Virgin Airlines Upper Class, riding coach is like going to Europe in a haywagon, in a locked trunk, with no air.

Our first leg on the journey was a lay-over in Boston, where we had some friends with whom we were going to visit for a day before leaving for London. They had just had my god-daughter, and my mother had been proclaimed an official grandmother as well.

We were waiting for our bags in the Manchester airport when I realized something was amiss. The Brain and I had packed extremely light, each of us taking a backpack with as little as necessity demanded for the trip. We had discussed this extensively with my mother and Madge beforehand, and, well, thought they got the picture. It became obvious that they did not when their bags appeared, late, in baggage claim encased in bright orange "HEAVY" stickers.

"What part of 'packing light' did you not understand, mother?'", I asked.

"We're ladies, and ladies require more things than young gentlemen." she replied.

We learned later that ladies apparently require two changes of clothing a day. Considering that we were going to be in Europe for 4 weeks, Madge had managed to pack 56 distinct outfits into her single, gigantic bag. My mother, who never possessed 56 distinct outfits in her life, had somehow still managed to stuff her bags full of 60 pounds of shoes, drugs, and make-up.

"Just who do you expect to carry those bags for you in Europe?" I asked. They did not know, presuming, I supposed, that Europeans were just naturally nice chaps who would volunteer to haul their luggage around for them.

It was about this time that the Brain pulled me aside and said, "You know what's happened here, don't you? You've just become the parent." I had to agree, and running with the idea, I put my foot down. We oversaw the purchase of new, lightweight, portable bags and the judiscious packing of them while we were still in Boston. We explained that it was not necessary to take 4 tubes of toothpaste to Europe; that, amazingly, the Europeans knew how to brush their teeth and would be happy to sell us toothpaste should we run out. The same went for the jumbo jars of aspirin, the quart bottles of Pepto Bismal, and the first aid kits. The remaining 50-odd pounds of clothes, drugs, and toiletries we shipped back to Texas. Even still, my mother clung to an unnecessary amount of shoes, make-up and pills, which she would end up shipping back to the US or throwing away once the reality of Europe finally smacked her squarely in the head.

Had I been keeping the head-smacking score, the final tally would have come to Mother 1, Europe 6.