In passing

 

We all have a talent for something.

Some of us sing or dance, some play an instrument, or play the ponies. Some of us crochet, some write. Some of us are scholars and some are gymnasts, figuratively speaking, who excel at the emotional contortions of parenthood.

My mother's greatest talent is talk: on the phone, face to face, over a meal, in the car. And boy, there's irony in that statement so vast that were it made of glass, you'd need a skyscraper to contain it. Just how does the Mistress of the Malaprop succeed at talk? The same woman who recently referred to her accountant as an SPCA, dubbed the remote control a pacemaker and called her retirement package a 40K?

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She does it by sheer force of personality. With it, my mother could turn a crowd of torch-wielding neo-Nazis into a sewing circle, albeit an exhausted one. Because boy, can she go on. 

Nowhere is this more evident than at funerals, to which she's been nearly four times in the last month. One was for a friend, the other three for cousins. She believes wholeheartedly that the dead deserve the traditional audience for their final act. And at 86, she's seen plenty of those acts while escaping her own.  

As they are for many of us, funerals have become one of the only routine family gatherings left; the days of having Sunday dinner each week with the relatives are as passe as Jean Nate perfume. So when those sendoffs come, my mother goes to work: informing other relatives,  getting "dolled up" --  "You should see what people wear to funerals these days" -- and often talking one of her kids into going with her.

The funeral parlor games are a sight to behold: I always say my mother can work a room. She isn't put off by those who might not recognize her at first. She remembers who was married to whom, who's divorced and who isn't, who was a "louse" and who wasn't. And she can conjure a long-ago memory that everyone else has long forgotten, drawing relatives around her and making them laugh just a tad too hard for a funeral.

After the sendoffs are over, she's whipped, but happy with herself for making the effort. Ask her: She is not above praising herself. My mother has a favorite expression that she applies to other chatty people, namely that they can "talk until they're blue in the face."

She's never applied that to herself, but she should. Because the mistress' ability to connect could make anyone green with envy.