My sister's going to come visit me at the end of this month. The fun part of it was how she surprised me on the phone one day to tell me, disguising the news in a normal-everyday-hey-I'll-come-by-and-try-on-those-dresses sort of conversation.
"But...how will you come by to try on...ohhhh." I always understood things better when I articulated them myself.
This made it a problem in college, because once I got it, I gave up trying to tutor other kids.
What? You don't get the idea of the commercializing radio lines? Pfft, sucks to be you. Talk it out yourself, kid.
But apparently, my sister wanted it to be a surprise to tell me, and apparently the family knew about it, kindly keeping everything hush-hush, so Sam could drop the news herself. Of course, this doesn't explain, why when I had this following conversation with my mom, why she felt that she had the right to say, "Oh, yeah, Sam's going to go visit you, did you know?"
"Yeah, mom, she told me."
"She actually wanted it to be a surprise," my mom realized lightly. "Ha-ha. Well, if you know, then it's okay."
"Wait." I stopped her. "You knew that it was supposed to be a surprise and still told me?"
"Yeah," my mother reasoned. "But you already knew, so it's okay."
"It's not okay!" I replied a little too shrilly. Embarrassed, I made up for my volume by attempting a zen, articulate voice. "You basically admitted to knowingly ruined Sam's surprise," I whispered quickly
"No." Her calm, patronizing tone was like gas to my emotional fire of annoyance. "But you know already, Georgette, so it doesn't matter."
"No," I corrected, just as stern, "you only learned that I knew after you blew the surprise. You willingly went in to ruin the surprise!"
Now the fact that this conversation was basically moot didn't deter me. No, like my mother, in my heart, I had to argue for the principle of the matter. So many years growing up in my household, I remembering hearing "it's the principle of the matter" as often as I'd hear "Georgette, eat now!" So I guess I take both of those phrases to heart and stomach.
I'm not sure if my mother thought of this phrase when she exhaled sharply in Georgia and right into my ear in New York, but I'm sure she didn't appreciate the fact that her daughter was standing up to her about the principle of the matter, or that's what I gathered when she said, "Georgette, I can't talk to you. It's always something."
"You don't get it!" My mother and I hate that phrase. Talk about gasoline on a fire.
"I didn't ruin it!" she replied back, my annoyance feeding into hers.
"You did!" I insisted.
I could go on or you, the reader, can just start back up and reread this conversation through, because we basically argued in circles until finally I told her that I would talk to her later, and after a round of "fine!" and "fine!" we told one another that we loved each other and hung up.
Of course, with both of us doing, feeling a sense of justice and right on our side.