Do you ever feel on the defensive talking to your mother? Especially since you have missed your father's funeral and the last time you saw your Mom was about a year ago? 'Business deals' don't really cut it for an excuse when you are face to face with a near bedridden octogenarian. She is still your Mom and you are still her child.
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"Oh, so you have remembered where I live, Jim. Its good to see my clever son again after such a while."
"I'm glad I had the chance to come here today, Mother. Not only to see you either. The drive through this part was very nice, a lot better than the hills in Vermont."
"Yes."
"Well Mother, we thought - Sis and I thought - that you would appreciate the scenery. Lake Como is not very far away. This little corner is rather pretty don't you think?"
"Lake Como is in Italy. Just over the border. What you saw when you came in to land was probably Lake Maggiore. It was Lugano you came in to, wasn't it?"
"Yes. Your right. That's the one I saw. But Como is not very far away."
"In Italy. Besides, it is full of cheap tourist traps."
"Some of these people you dismiss as tourists have come to recuperate after surgery. After all, part of the business I am in helps these people. Their success also helps us keep a very good place for you."
"Son, you work too hard for someone your age. Perhaps I'll get your sister and you to take me Maggiore one day."
"I'm sure we would manage that sometime, we'll get our diaries sync'd for sometime in April? How does that sound?"
"Improbable. Your Sister is nearly as bad as you, Jim. And don't forget I have a diary too. I'm not just in here to vegetate."
"No of course you do! Oh. Sorry I mean, of course you aren't. You run your own diary!"
"Oh Jim. Have you just made a Freudian slip? And you know what we used to say about that."
"Em, yes, eh... What Dad used to say was, 'His wife's pajamas.'"
"Hee, Hee, heee! He said that to you as well!" She had dropped her stern appearance and gone back to being Mom. "Oh Jim. Hmm, Dada... Jim, you realise that you are the man of the family now."
"Yes, I realise... At least it was sudden - with Dad, I mean."
"You mean not like me? Twenty years getting a little bit more broken every year. We never thought when I was sixty that I would still be breathing twenty years later. But five years later and Dada didn't think I was still a woman any longer... Oh just give me a moment!"
Jim waited and he didn't see the hunched up old woman with the uneven face. He saw his mother, the tall woman who had walked beside him when he went into school. But this was something he had not expected. This was the first hint of criticism he had ever heard from her about his Dad's care of Mom. He would not have expected to hear Sis talk of it either, if she knew.
He waited. He was used to looking people in the eye and waiting for them to talk to him. They felt safer then and would open up more. And he had climbed so far as he had by spotting the opportunities open up. That was one of the reasons the Company had done so well over the past quarter century.
"What plastics does your company sell, Jim?"
"Ah," he looked around for examples, "this machine, or instrument cover, it looks pleasant to the eye, doesn't it."
"That thing? That has got electronics and compressed oxygen in it. There must be lots of metal pipes and things! You don't make that!"
"What we did there was design the cover. Or our Italian bureau did it, but they are part of the company. We don't want the users to see the complexity of that instrument, we only want them to see it as a very useful tool. And pleasant to look at and easy to keep clean. That surface is quite soft to the touch. But it is a firm structure, standing there upright and yet stable. No sharp corners."
"Jim?"
"Yes?"
"Do you know what it looks like to me?"
"The Italian name for it is a 'Capuchino' I think. Same as the coffee."
"Do you know what that means? Properly?"
"Yes. A kind of bishop's cowl, the sort of thing they wear in the Vatican."
"Well, you must have heard what they say about them! All these dirty priests! I'll stick with a good Americano. Two sugar."
"Do you ever use it to get out of your chair - the instrument, not the coffee, that is?"
"Both. But as you say, it is stable and it happens to come up to my head height where I am sitting so I do clutch it to keep my balance till I'm up. Then its like a big prick against my Oh!"
"It's okay Mother. There is a similarity. It's just that I didn't think you would notice."
"Oh really? And you many children have you birthed? None! You may well have one of these pillars but it is on the outside. That is not where I liked to feel it. It meant Life to me! Security, safety, submission, success too! Half of you and your Sister came out of one of these. There is one of these in every room here, I call mine Paul! Phal would have been even more inhuman."
"I see Mother."
"Thank you. I am glad of that. Now what else does your firm make?"