Bedwetter

The Fourth of July and my birthday are both coming up in a couple of weeks, which means two things. First, JHP will attempt (usually unsuccessfully) to steel himself for any possible sightings or encounters with the ne plus ultra of his phobias, Uncle Sam on stilts. The second thing is that I will begin to get phone calls from my mother that are both precisely timed and scripted, and describe in detail the days leading up to my birth.

Happy birthday America, ye bastion of whiny lardbottoms, ye.

 

I don't know when she started this tradition, but I can't remember a Fourth when I wasn't greeted with a (insert my pending age) "years ago today, I was making a blackberry cobbler for your dad and Uncle Bob, and I burned my arm on the stove..." etc. This goes on periodically for the next two days when we get to my actual birthday and money shot, as it were. It's not a particularly exciting story (the dramatic highlight is the retelling of a vaguely suspicious vehicle that was outside their apartment and never seen again. Kind of dull stuff), but it's mine, and I love it. The best part is how Mom tells each installment completely seriously and without preamble - no "hello" when I answer the phone, just a solemn "By now I'd made a German chocolate cake and decided to wash my hair..." in her thick Nashville accent.

 

Even though I know the whole story word for word at this point I still look forward to this every year. Back before cell phones, catching each phone call could get a little dicey, and missing one would throw the whole thing into chaos and lawlessness....human sacrifices, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria! So you can imagine how happy I was to come home one July 5th some years ago and find that Mom had left that evening's installment on my answering machine. More precisely, she'd left it on the answering machine of the people for whom I was house sitting. The 7/5 pm episode is my favorite, because that's when her water breaks and we finally get this show on the road. "...and I woke up in the middle of the night, and the bed was aaallll wet so I said 'Dennis! I think I wet the bed!' so I got up and went to the bathroom. I woke up later on that night, and said 'Dennis! I think I wet the bed AGAIN!'..." I was so pleased to have part of the story documented that I immediately opened the answering machine and swapped the tape with what I thought was a spare tape inside next to it. What I didn't realize was that by doing so I'd actually made Mom's story the outgoing message on the machine. And remember I was house sitting? It was for my old boss, the former senator from the great state of Tennessee who was at the time the US Ambassador to China. For over two months callers to his house were greeted with a five-minute dramatic reenactment of the time some anonymous country woman twice thought she'd wet her bed.

 

She's really good at storytelling and fake peeing. All reasonable offers considered.

 

Some very, very important people left some very, very confused messages on that machine before I finally figured out what I'd done. "Um...Secretary Albright would like to speak to the Ambassador but we have the wrong number?" "Ah. Well. Let me see. I'm calling from the Washington Post. I'll try back later." When I called Mom to tell her about it her reaction was a firm and certain "No, that did not happen. Dennis! Bring me a scotch, baby." To this day we do not speak of it.

 

Personally I'm just relieved that this didn't trigger an international incident, or get misinterpreted as some sort of strange American S&M etiquette. I also wonder how many people are still wondering what happened after Dennis! went off to work and she finished hanging my mobile. You'll just have to wait until she calls on the 6th!