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?"
"Mom, its not really my firm. I only own a hundred thousand shares in it. What I look after i"...
"At sixty-four dollars each in Frankfurt this morning. That a nought point three percent increase this month!"
"Is it? I don't have much time to look. I came to Switzerland this trip mainly to speak to our people in Implants. They do more of them here now than cuckoo clocks. Just do a web search for 'plastics, switzerland' and see what you get. The clinics are fighting over it! Its great business!"
"An implant would have to be a bionic one for your poor old mother."
"Maybe we can do that once one of our people works out the needs."
"No Jim. They will not. You will. You know the needs now."
"I know?"
"Yes. You know. I am a woman. You remember what I said? 'It meant life to me'. Will I ever see you again?"
Jim was thinking as fast as he could but his brain was going in multiple directions: Appointments, What standards would be acceptable, What standards would be achievable, What was already available on the market, How much time did he have before it was too late for his mother? Something out there was missing. He didn't know what it was.
"Not tomorrow Mother. You will see me again, but tomorrow gives me no time for anything good enough for you. You know you are holding a gun to my head!"
"I don't want a gun, son, but if it fires, well thats expected, isn't it."
"Okay, it will be worthwhile. If that clock up there is going cuckoo for your dinner then its time I went to get mine. Bye, I love you."
"I love you too son. Thank you."
Jim was having trouble thinking on his way back to the hotel. He wasn't sure which side of the road to drive on some of the way. He had to pull himself out of his wanderings when he approached the town and saw the busses and other traffic. A decent meal ought to help - it usually did.
When he had eaten he went up to his room and had coffee sent. Black. No sugar. He sat down where he could see the door and opened his case on one side and his laptop on the other. Search for 'What' was available. The answer was dispiriting but his coffee came in and he sipped a little, still looking at the screens. The next screen came up, 'No more found'.
An empty screen! An opportunity! Stuff it to them! Again he typed the requirements, but this time into one of the Company's request-response forms. The last box was for a request for a sketch. He was halfway through drawing it on the screen when his thighs got too hot from the processor. It always did this for heavy graphics work so he put it on the floor but as he leaned over he discovered something hard in his trousers and it gave him an idea. He had an option for photographic input so he went to his case and set up a frame, pulled down his trousers and pulled up his shirt. Then he lay on the floor, brought the frame over and started it climbing round his fully swollen member. When was it last so strong?
That would be better than even an excellent sketch. Remembering it would be for an eighty year old woman who had not had his Dad in her for fifteen years, he chose a five sixths scale. SEND.
He woke from a poor night's sleep with an unusually large morning erection. Last night he had been dreaming about putting it into his mother. He was shocked in the shower cabinet to see the spurts going chest high. That was not his recent style.
As he was having breakfast he started to call the men and women he would meet that morning, just to make sure they were fine to meet him. Most of the Company round the world knew by now that if you didn't go to visit Jim then he would come looking for you. One family had actually become closer when he did visit. Jim paid them the courtesy of being interested and saved their marriage. He had nearly been invited into the bed with them both. He still wondered if he had done right to decline.
A message came up from the Italian bureau: Confirm last night's request. It had been a very high spec article, query viscosity of fluid to be pumped. Jim confirmed that he had met the client for the prototype yesterday and suggested a twenty percent sugar solution but to use their own judgement.