Conversations with Mom

Yesterday my mother called me, "Lesley, that you?" Who else would be answering my phone? "How you doing?" She continued, "remember that thing with my eye?" A few weeks ago my mother had told me that she had tunnel vision. "Well, guess what? It's glaucoma." My mother sounded her usual cheerful self, I swear, the sky could fall on her head and her response would always be, "It could always be worse."
"Girl, you better not have that baby here!" My mother lovingly admonishes one of her co-workers. Although it is Sunday, she is at work at the very same bank she started working in over 36 years ago. Well, it's not the very same place, but it is the same company. My mother has always worked in "receiving" which meant where they input all the data to clear checks. You could kind of guess what has happened to that position with the dawning of debit cards and computers...but I always loved to go by my mother's job. She always worked in the back--you would have to walk through where all the white people worked to get to where all the mostly African American and Caribbean women worked--bad-talking supervisors and holding stubbornly on to their accents.
"Lesley, this girl here about to have a baby--I tell she she better not have that baby here!" she continues to the girl, "When you having that baby?"
"In two weeks", I hear the response through the phone.
"Lesley, this girl about to have her baby and she still has to come to work."
"Ask her how much time she gonna get off after she has the baby."
"Six weeks", is the response, "she entitled to 6 weeks off on disability."
"Guess what Lesley", mom continues, "things in this country bad. I pay $97 a month for medical and then have to pay $57 for my medicine a month for my glaucoma. Things in this country bad girl," she sucks her teeth.
I tease, "Mom, don't complain to me, you're the one who has lived there for over 36 years and have never voted."
"Who don't vote?" She challenged, "I vote for Obama at the Primary," she whispers, as if she has done something bad. It's the first time my mother has EVER voted.
After I get off the phone with my mother, I can't help but to laugh. She asked before getting off the phone, "Lesley, I can't come and live with you?"
"I'm not staying here Mom." I tell her, "I can't live here forever." My mother doesn't understand how much I miss a vibrantly colored world. She doesn't understand that if it were not for my son, whose father lives here, I would not, under any circumstances, be here.
"But Denmark nice girl." She says in her dreaming way, in that way we all do when we romanticize that place anywhere else than where we happen to be. My response? I do the same, "I think I'm going to settle in Trinidad," I say--something I have not only never uttered in my entire life, but something I could not have ever, before now, fathomed.
Peace,
lab