OUT of the MOUTHS of BABES...

Actually, my mother just told me the other night that she was never considered a "babe," never one of good-looking ones, but she always had plenty of boyfriends -- what her mother might have classified as "beaux." She went so far as to tell me which of them she liked best and which of them her parents liked best. All this to say that this is not really from the mouths of babes, but it is from the mouths of dames, or one dame in particular.

A Very Rich Relation of my mother's always wished that the grandmother my mother couldn't get along with at all had been his mother, because she was such a live wire; unlike his own mother, his aunt "was a firecracker."

For all her faults, I suspect my mother was also a "firecracker." A tomboy of long standing who knew what she liked in a man. None of her sons have ever quite measured up, but that's another long story. At the moment, we're talking about truth from a babe's mouth here...

Anyway, the other night, when I was singing her the song of how last Monday I had come as close to thinking that I had made a Really Big Mistake in throwing in my lot with the Goat as I could imagine, she took me to task for not telling her about it earlier, and talked around the subject for a while before ending with the pithy remark that she hoped I didn't "get my heart busted." [Me, too.]

But along the way, she allowed as to how her first marriage had not gone well, and she should have seen the signs from the beginning: how everything had to be his way, etc. She wondered why in hell her parents, who were perfectly sensible people, hadn't seen it and warned her off. I allowed, thinking only of her at 22, that that was something parents of good sense might reasonably hesitate to do; in the worst case, it could cause the child to cling to object of her affections and pull away from her parents.

Then it occurred to me that the same thing applied to me.

Hmmmmm. Well, if she was trying to do what her parents failed to do, she failed in spite of trying. That's the way it goes.

Great weekend with the Goat, for those of you keeping track, including an unusual amount of acrobatics and another large party where I knew practically nobody -- it was all people connected to The Academy -- but I did run into someone with whom [if you'll pardon the schoolmarm locution] I had been really good pals back in 1965. That was odd, to say the least. And in the Big Woods, of all places...

Hang in there, all.
C