Last night Alex specifically requested that his daddy give him a bath; I suspect it’s because his daddy does much better than I do at playing along with submarine excursions and Rescue Heroes’ missions and other tub-time games that make little boys feel better when they’re under the weather.

So because D had bathtime well under control, I was a completely captive audience when my mother-in-law called about two minutes after Alex hopped in the tub. Usually Martha manages to catch me right about the time that I’m simultaneously trying to cook supper, feed the dogs, and convince Alex that he needs to walk as opposed to stomp when he passes through the dining room since the sound of all that china rattling makes his mama a might bit nervous and all, but last night Martha timed it just right. Since Alex was occupied, I had nothing to do but sit in front of the fire and talk. Or listen, as it were.

And I promise y’all: if there were some way that I could have recorded her (with permission, of course), I would’ve done it in a heartbeat and then posted it here, because there is absolutely no way the written form can adequately capture or convey what it’s like to listen to my mother-in-law. She is a conversational force of nature, more Southern than anyone I’ve ever known in my life, and completely capable of covering multitudes of topics in a ten minute time span. And there’s no doubt about it: between inheriting Martha’s genetic make-up as well as mine, Alex’s gene pool is brimming with some very! excited! DNA! from two different families, thereby guaranteeing that he’ll spend the rest of his days experiencing unbridled enthusiasm over, well, absolutely everything.

At least that’s what I tell myself when he’s clapping for the packages of frozen corn in the grocery store.

So last night when Martha realized that I was going to be able to talk without distractions, she was delighted! just delighted! and I had no more said, “What’s been going on with you?” before this is what I heard:

“Well, today I went to the beauty parlor, and afterwards I went to Save Rite, you know the grocery store that’s where Sack and Save used to be? Well, they had some ground beef on sale and I was finishing up at the check out when I ran into that cute little girl D went to high school with, you know the one who married the fireman named oh, I can’t think of his name but her name is oh, what is her name? She’s darlin’, just darlin’, looks just like she did in high school but I can’t think of her name, but I know she’s a nurse and works at the hospital, I mean she’s not in the towers with the offices or anything but works in the actual hospital and does a lot of the bloodwork for Dr. Jones?”

“Missy?” I said.

“OH yes, yes it’s Missy, that’s exactly who it is, and she gave me an email address to give to D. because she said she’d just lost touch with him altogether and would just love to hear from him and now get a pen so you can write this down; you’ll have to help me a little bit because you know I won’t know what I’m reading but this is what she wrote down so do you have a pen?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Okay. It’s [random series of letters] and then it’s ‘at,’ only you don’t write the word ‘a-t’ you make an ‘a’ instead and then you put one of those little swirlies around it? You know the little swirlies? That sort of go ‘whoosh’ right around that ‘a’? And then what she has next is something like a-o-l-dot-com, would that make sense? Would that be right for the email address? I mean, she just wants D to have it so he can send her the email.”

“Yes ma’am, that makes sense.”

“Well I mean I was in sort of a hurry because I’d just left the beauty parlor and we were standing in the parking lot and it was misting and my hair was falling and getting flatter by the second but she did say that she would love to hear from y’all and didn’t even know that you were living where you’re living or that you have a little boy but I just couldn’t talk much longer, I just couldn’t, because, well, my hair.”

“Oh, yes ma’am.”

“But now I did get to go to Steinmarts last week with MA and M and do you know we couldn’t find anything? We looked and looked but of course they weren’t expecting their spring lines until this week and really all they had were separates, I just don’t think they hardly even carry dresses anymore, and what I really wanted was a pretty three-piece pantsuit, maybe something in a sort of periwinkle? I mean I’d take lilac or a steel blue or maybe even sort of a cornflower blue but I just think periwinkle would be so pretty, but they didn’t have anything like that there, and M did find a cute little vest that had sort of a leopard print pattern on the vest and the collar was fur, well I mean of course it was a fake fur, a fake fur, but it was absolutely adorable and I’m so glad she found it but I didn’t get a thing. And I looked at Belk’s earlier in the week and they just didn’t have anything, and finally I went to the manager and said, ‘Look at me. Do you see anything in this store that I could wear? Because I don’t see anything for a woman who’s petite and a little older,’ and he tried to tell me that they have some lovely things, but I said, ‘Look around at the clerks who are my age. Do you see anything they could wear? Because everything is just for someone much younger than I am, and I do wish y’all would carry the Pursuits line. Everybody in this town just loved the Pursuits line when this was McRae’s, and it washed well and wore well and held up well.’ But then he told me that Pursuits was a private line for McRae’s, and doesn’t that just figure, because I just loved it, I loved it!”

“I liked the Pursuits stuff, too,” I replied.

“OH, I know, we all did, and of course they don’t carry that anymore and really everybody that I know is shopping at Dillard’s, even though they hardly ever have sales, but do you know I got a $65 jacket there for $15? And then the next day I went back and they had an extra 50% off and I got a jacket for $12? So when you hit a sale you can do really well but the problem is that they just don’t have sales nearly as often as Belk’s, but what good is a sale if there’s nothing there that I want to buy?”

And that was just the first eight minutes, my friends. We talked for almost half an hour, but if I attempted to transcribe the rest I would no doubt find myself at the hospital tomorrow in dire need of treatment for carpal-tunnel syndrome. Suffice it to say that the conversation with Martha was the absolute highlight of my day.

Also: one time, many years ago, Martha called D to tell him that he had received a UPS package from Amazon-Dot-C-Zero-M.

You really can’t help but love her.

Thank you and good night.