Phone calls

This afternoon, my Nana called to check up on me. It was a bizarre conversation, almost as if she was cross-examining me. At one point, she said, "Is there anything else I'm supposed to ask you?"

I said "Nana, what are you talking about?"

She said, "Well, when you would talk to your mother, what would she ask you?"

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I opted for laughter then, but as I'm typing this I have tears in my eyes. After all, there's something precious and funny -- and at the same time, horribly sad -- about my Nana feeling that she somehow needs to be my mother's conversation replacement. But no one -- not even my determined little grandmother -- could ever be that; it's pointless to even try.

So, I told my Nana about the phone conversations. How I talked to my mother almost every day, about nothing and everything. About how sometimes it was to ask a question, and sometimes it was just to tell her about something I did or something I bought -- but how the conversation never went according to a script.

But I didn't tell Nana about the real point of almost all of the conversations: To make my mother laugh. On the airplane down to Florida exactly two months ago, one of the things I jotted in my notebook was that "She always found my strangeness funny. And I always obliged because I didn't care if she was laughing with me or at me. As long as she was laughing."

At the funeral, I stood up and said some things, most of which I don't really remember. I do, however, know that I said that my mother had the best laugh. And it's that, not the rambling conversations, that I miss the most.