Channeling mom

Remember Must-see TV, the old advertising jingle NBC used to promote Thursday night shows like ER and Friends?    

NBC has nothing on mom, whose frequent mantra should be "Turn on the TV now TV."

A couple of weeks ago, she called me in the late afternoon as I sat doing a day's work and firmly told me to tune in to Dr. Phil because his show was about people who have been bitten by dogs. 

I attributed this to one of two things: she once sustained a dog bite to the chest as a little girl, and she  watches so much TV that anything half interesting on the six channels she gets is worth interrupting my workday for.

I didn't tune in. But it wasn't the first, nor will it be the last time she urged me to watch something. Like her 100th viewing of Bette Davis in Now, Voyager, a movie we both love, I should add. The day's episode of I Love Lucy - any one of them, actually, but the ballet lesson and the candy factory are  favorites. Luciano Pavarotti on channel 12. 

I'm just glad The Lawrence Welk Show doesn't air on her TV. 

These little TV "suggestions" are like many things she asks of me, most of which I can't deny her. A trip to the supermarket for "a few things" that ends with me hauling six bags of groceries to her fourth-floor apartment. A visit to the nail salon, where I sit up front and ready my phone while she regales her oblivious nail technician with details of her life: that she has "this one nail" that always falls off; that  she has five children; that her daughter - that would be me - "comes all the way from Jersey" to take her out on Wednesdays, a Jersey that is 40 minutes away from where she lives in Philadelphia.

At a recent medical appointment, she told her dermatologist that he looks too young to be practicing any kind of medicine and that she has a really good-looking grandson who's available to one of the nurses. He isn't. (She also tells said grandson that he should be a model. He rolls his eyes.)

When her birthday or Mother's Day is close, she will request specific gifts: "you know, in case anyone wants to know what to get me." Gift cards are welcome if we can't decide which of her requests to fulfill. (She has yet to ask me or my sister - with five children between us - what she can do for us on Mother's Day.)

We take it all in stride, because after all, she will be 88 this year, a fact that makes her particularly popular at funerals, not to sound ghoulish. I've seen my mother work rooms socially all my life, but not like she does when someone has died. It's partly because she is the oldest of the cousins on both sides of her family, and partly because she has outlived many of them.

I've watched as those cousins and their children and their children's children flocked to her to hear stories about the past that involve their parents and grandparents. She doesn't sit down, she grazes, stopping to talk to someone, then moving on to the next mourner as if she were reaching for the bread sticks at an all-you-can-eat buffet. 

These occasions are also among those I can't deny her when she asks me to go along. One of these days I'll have the gumption to, as Nancy Reagan advised, "Just say no." 

Now that would be must-see TV. 


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