 Comedy: August 23, 2023 Issue [#12143] |
This week: Mirror, Mirror Edited by: 🐕GeminiGem🎁  
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Hi there! I am 🐕GeminiGem🎁, one of the regular editors of the Comedy Newsletter. What do you see when you look in the mirror? Read on to find out what I see and why it is my parents. |
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Mirror, Mirror
I have a complicated relationship with mirrors.
I doubt this is unusual, although I haven't spent a whole lot of time asking people probing questions about their feelings about seeing their own reflections in a mirror. We all see our personal flaws, as do I, but I also see my family there. I see my grandmother's hair, my mother's eyes, and my father's eyebrows. I have learned to embrace Grandma's unruly curls but I refuse to comb my brows up like Dad did to create that quintessential befuddled-professor look. Sorry, not my vibe.
As a side note, I have explored the concept of self-image and what we see in the mirror (with a little help of some personification and supernatural elements) in "Reflections of a Mirror" .
In May of this year, I went home to Wisconsin to visit family. I was particularly struck by how much my brothers reminded me of Dad. It was there in their looks (read: the male pattern baldness), it was there in their gestures and posture, it was there in their logic, thinking processes, and stubborness, I mean tenacity. I suppose it seemed exaggerated to me because we lost Dad in 2020, and we had just lost one of our brothers. I found the resemblances endearing. My husband, not so much. He had always loved and admired my dad, but he found it harder to appreciate the next generation's version of Dad.
Several years ago, my parents sold the family home that they had lived in for something like 50 years. It was a two-story house with a full attic and a full basement, and they were moving into a retirement apartment. My husband and I traveled back to Wisconsin to help with the massive yard sale they held to clear the house out. I went back home to Colorado with a car packed full of stuff either I wanted or Mom really wanted me to have.
I was astonished by the things that they sold without batting an eye, and the things they had a hard time letting go. I remember one incident where Dad came outside, grabbed some battered 40-year-old suitcases we had out for sale, and put them right back in the house. Mom watched him do this and sighed, "I'll probably die with those ugly old suitcases in our storage unit." She knew better than to argue with her husband about the old suitcases.
Now we return the story to May of this year, with the family gathered to clean out my late-brother's house. We really did work pretty well as a team, but I know my brothers got on my husband's nerves a few times during the process. Brother Number One asks him to carry the large stack of heavy boxes of books to his car so they can be taken for donation to either a library or a thrift store. When my husband was done with that, Brother Number Two tells him the boxes of books need to stay in the house so the Historical Society can go through them first.
"Why can't we just get rid of these old things?" my husband complained to me.
Knowing full well that both brothers were book hoarders, I mean collectors, I shrug and say, "At least the two of them aren't trying to find a way to ship all those books to their respective homes, sorted by genre and alphabetized by author's names and book title."
As usual, my husband failed to see the humor in my logic. Or the logic in my humor.
My husband had already heard the family legends about Dad and books. How Dad had to take a steam ship instead of an airplane from Scotland to the U.S. in 1949 because he had collected so many books while attending graduate school in Edenborough. He also knew the story about how my parents had to put extra heavy duty springs on the family car to move to the south in the 1950's because the car was so loaded down with books. After the car was unloaded, Mom got pulled over by the police because they suspected her of running moonshine with the backend of the car riding so high minus the weight from the books. Whoopsie...
After we spent several days cleaning out my late-brother's house, I once again went home to Colorado with a car full of things I wanted to keep and things Mom wanted me to keep. Yes, my small house is getting a little full, but my husband should count his lucky stars the one thing I don't collect is books.  |
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Would you like to be featured in one of my newsletters? I am a regular editor of the COMEDY newsletter and a guest editor of other newsletters. You never know where I might pop up!
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