We sat across from each other in a booth on sky-blue benches whose springs were sagging (broken by years of obese guests, I am guessing). I sat just a little too low. Or the table was just a little too high. We ordered coffee, black, and the young waitress brought a little carafe to leave on the table. My mother ordered quiche, with a muffin. I ordered eggs, with fruit: What can they do to ruin eggs, right? The food came quickly. (It doesn't take long to scramble a couple eggs.) Mom skinned the top of a little container of grape jelly and spread it generously over one of her muffins. She did the same to the other one. She took a big bite of jelly-covered muffin. For the rest of the conversation, she had jelly on her chin. I tried to ignore it.“I'm really glad to be done with this condo board stuff,” she said. “But some of the residents aren't too happy with the way the board president handled the elections.” She picked experimentally at the little slice of quiche pie with her fork.
“Oh, why is that?” I replied. I was doing my own experimental poking, at my eggs. Scrambled. They looked okay, so I ate a bite. Just about what you would expect of scrambled eggs.
“She nominated and elected people who weren't even there!” my mother complained.
“Wow, you mean people were elected in absentia?” Having served on a board before, I understand some of the shenanigans that can go on when chairpeople start feeling their power.
“That's right! And some of us are not going to stand for it!” She took another bite of muffin. Purple jelly sprayed gently across the table.
“Uh-oh,” I said, sipping the weak brown coffee. “Mom, what are you going to do?”
“A group of us are getting together to decide our strategy,” she said, popping a grape in her mouth and looking smug.
After a moment's reflection, I interpreted her comment. “You mean, you've formed a cabal and you are planning a mutiny of the condo board.”
She looked a little abashed. “Well, when you put it like that...”
I tried to explain to her what would happen when the board found out that a group of residents had gone outside the committee/board process to express their grievances. It would look like the condo equivalent of a military revolution. I pictured a horde of old folks shuffling along the condo walkways toward the chairperson's unit, pitchforks in hand, mumbling, “Get her,” and “No guts, no glory” and “Slow down, ooh, my back.” With my mother leading the pack. She'd be a holy terror with a pitchfork.
I sighed. “You are a lightning rod for trouble,” I said.
She grinned. “I know.”
We ate in silence for a minute or two. I thought longingly of my lovely Trader Joe's Bay Blend coffee waiting for me at home. Even cold, the stuff will put hair in places you've never seen hair before. Delicious. Oh well. Shari's does the best they can, with what they have. It's not Starbucks, after all.
“She won't even call on me anymore in the condo meetings.”
I looked at my mother with some perplexity. My mother, this scrawny woman with the wrinkled skin and flyaway halo of gray hair, with her squinty eyes hidden behind chunky trifocals, this skinny little person with her elastic-waist blue jeans, old white sneakers, and dentures... somehow my mother has managed to intimidate the board chair to the extent that the chair will no longer let her speak at the condo meetings. Way to go, Mom.
I think I figured her out. Tonight as I avoid watching the re-run of the Sound of Music and some country music Christmas special, as I wait for Saturday Night Live to put this stupid cold season into perspective for me, I have some time to think. After all the photo scanning I've done over the past week, I have a visual sense of my mother from her earliest days, through teenhood, into marriage and motherhood, into middle age and retirement, and into widowhood. I think I have her pegged. My mother is a rabble-rowser. She's a pot-stirrer. Oh, my! She's a... she's a chronic malcontent!
I guess that old saying about apples and trees might actually be true.
