How Much Would You Pay To Get Your Mother Back?
Elderly parents — be they free or kidnapped, always fall to the oldest.
By Mark Whitney
I do not know Alexei Navalny or Savannah Guthrie.
Until yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, I never even heard of the Russian dissident. Turns out he was “killed by a poison derived from a rare frog toxin.”
If you build your brand as a political enemy of Vladimir Putin, knowing full well that the Russian strongman operates an Arctic Circle penal colony called Polar Wolf, you have my respect.
But when you so thoroughly worm your way under the President For Life’s Grinchy skin that it’s not enough for him to render you to Polar Wolf, he whacks you with a poison frog. That’s a Disney movie: the ultimate grim fairy tale.1
As mentioned, I also do not know Savannah Guthrie. Outside my silo though she may be, I am aware of reports that Ms. Guthrie apparently offered The Kidnappers™ $6 million for the return of her 84-year-old mom.
Today is my mother’s birthday. She is 89. Mom runs me about $50,000 a year. I am man enough to admit that poison frog never occurred to me. My only concern is that the pyllobates terribilis is vulnerable to parasites, so Mom may have the edge. But, it’s worth a shot!
I reached out to The Kidnappers™ via Snapchat, offering them $50,000 a year for Mom, and they’re like, “Dude, we don’t have your Mom.”
That’s when it hit them. “Wait a minute. You want us to kidnap her? Dude, that’s fucked up! This is your Mom we’re talking about!”
Definitely not the real The Kidnappers™.
Not everyone knows this, but my adopted home of San Diego is the most biodiverse city in the United States. I might be able to find one of these Dart Frogs in the wild. But, Plan A is I know this comic, Basab, from the Palindrome region of India.
“My name is Basab. I am part Asian and part Caucasian. ‘Cauc’ is a small part of it.” (pause for silence)
When Basab is not bombing at our World Famous Comedy Store, he works part-time at our World Famous San Diego Zoo. Maybe Basab can hook me up.
Dart Frogs are laced with epibatidine, causing full-body numbness, as opposed to the from-the-neck-up numbness which has long afflicted my mother.
Don’t believe me?
Every Sunday I bring Mom two old fashioned donuts, coffee, some kind of breakfast sandwich, and the New York Times in hardcopy, which she complains is getting too heavy for her.
Mom lives alone. Her choice. She falls down. Her choice. She is not safe. Her choice. She does not eat right. Her choice. But that’s not why I called.
During Sunday’s visit, she looks up from the New York Times, takes a sip of coffee, looks me dead in the eye and says, “The Obamas are not apes. But they look like apes.”2
She is not joking. “Where do you come up with this?” I query.
Gesticulating toward her own impenetrable skull: “Brains!”
Brains. Plural.
In fairness to Mom, she was born in Westerly, R.I., in 1937. When she was four, Mom’s aunt took her away from her drunk mother, a cliché Mahoney, and her drunk father, a cliché O’Neil. In Mom’s day, racism was less subtle. For example, it was totally normal for the Times to report accordingly:
“Patrolman Michael Darienzo of Motorcycle Squad 1 was in a patrol car near the subway station at about 7 A. M., when he saw Hinton, who is a Negro, running from the station and heard cries of “Help! police!’” ~NY Times, July 31, 1939
In high school Mom worked in the kitchen at the Misquamicut Club, just up the shore from Taylor Swift’s place in Watch Hill.
Mom likes to repeat the story about that one time after a late-night, private function, she and her sister loaded a loaded Ethel Kennedy into the back of their M.G. and drove her home.
If we’ve learned one thing in the past ten years it is that nothing good happens at the golf course.
In a more perfect world, Mom might be a candidate for conservatorship. But she would also be entitled to counsel. You cannot defeat a blissfully, unaware 89 year-old woman who freely contradicts herself by unwittingly crafting the world’s first, one word, internally inconsistent sentence.
“Brains!”
Elderly parents — be they free or kidnapped, $50,000 a year or $6M lump sum — always fall to the oldest. I’m the guy cash-flowing a one woman Solar Wolf in sunny southern California, while swapping 5-Star TSA jokes for a biological weapon that croaks.
The only thing Mom took from Catholic school is The One Commandment.
“Honor thy mother.”
And so I do.
Do not laugh at that. It will only encourage me.
Amazing! 33% of Mom’s 12 grandchildren and great-grandchildren are the product of mixed-race relationships, and 75% of them look like more like Obama grandkids than ones spawned by the progeny of Irish stone masons and British robber barons.