Bling (Revised, with Paragraphs!)

My mom was acting strangely, even for her. We were back in her apartment after having dinner at the same restaurant where she has the same percentage of the same dinner at the same table every Sunday at five o'clock on the dot. Have I mentioned she's a creature of habit?

Anyway, I can always count on her going about her usual business, which will include, in this particular order, checking the voice mails she can barely hear and complaining about all the pain in the ass phone calls, returning all the pain in the ass phone calls because to not do so immediately would just be wrong, checking her emails and complaining about all the silly Internet jokes and laughing out loud at each one, changing from her St. John suit into her ratty old house dress, pressing her St. John suit and lovingly hanging it up, and finally, removing her makeup and performing some excruciating cleansing ritual on her teeth. Then, and only then, she might join me in the living room where I am sprawled on the couch watching some mindless television, still dressed and still in a food coma.

I have grown to depend on her utter predictability as much as she herself relies on the security of her daily rituals to make sense of her life, so when there is a breach of protocol, I get a bit thrown. Particularly when the breach seems to involve an inordinate amount of discussion about her potentially imminent demise. I know she is neither sick nor expecting to be hospitalized for any reason any time soon; if she were, she would have purchased a new nightgown -- complete with something she calls a bed coat (wtf?) -- and it would be sitting on the love seat in her bedroom, ready to be grabbed on her way out the door. One must have new bed attire for the hospital. I am not making this up. I speak from experience.

Apparently, she recently heard someone exactly her age claim that she was at the end of her life. I'm sure the deaths of Elizabeth Taylor and Geraldine Ferraro this week didn't help. My mom, god love her, is addressing her mortality as she addresses everything else: with a keen materialistic eye. So there I was, minding my own business and just beginning to slip into couch potato mode, and she appeared, having postponed at least a half dozen routines, dumping little velvet pouches of fine jewelry on the table in front of me. All stuff I will never wear, but she wanted me to help her decide what to sell (she'll never do it) and make sure I would hold on to certain pieces, just so I'd remember her. As if!

It's not something I want to think about, but, faced with her glittering array of eighteen carat gold and diamonds, I realized I can't imagine life without her and her outsized, conspicuously costly baubles. And the baubles alone will be a very poor substitute.

She and her crazy rituals are the few things in life I could always count on.