French damp in Flaming June

It was generally damp in France. Moreso when the water pump packed in. Predictably, it did so on a Friday morning in rural France, and no part available until Monday. Fortuitously, the insurance company (with whom we had breakdown cover) were also happy to put us up for the weekend in a local hotel. Just as well, or we would have spent 3 long days in a disabled camper on the garage forecourt. Instead we stayed warm in a Campanile motel, Surfer catching up with work while I watched TV movies in French. My French comes back to me easily I find, at least, my passive vocabulary. I can tune in to radio and tv and read the newspapers easily enough. Conversation doesn’t trip off my tongue. But then, that’s the same in English.
There’s no doubt I’m a happier soul, now I’m into my 50s, and much less interested in conversation. Living next door to my mother is an education. My greatest fear is that I turn into her, wittering and irrelevant. Fortunate, I suppose, to have this alarm bell ringing right on my doorstep.
Just before Christmas, our oldest cat gave up the ghost. It was no surprise, she was 18 years old. Her pancreas started to fail, she ate very little and moved about less. The vets offered a course of treatment, injections and special diet and what have you, but after a few days I could see it wasn’t taking. And I went back to the vet and asked if we could just do the right thing. I really don’t want to watch her starve to death over the next 4 or 5 days. I muttered to the vet. He agreed, and it was done.
I loved that cat tremendously, she was such a dear friend to me over the years, she looked after me many times. If I was stressed or fretting over some slight, imagined or otherwise, she would plant herself on my chest and reduce my movements to simple breathing, and gradually I would become calm. I learned so much from that cat, particularly the way she died. Calm, and quiet.
I have no doubt my mother will choose another path. The non-quiet path.
She talks more and more these days, an unending stream of irrelevance, stories… no, not even stories of people I’ve never met. Just… things about them. She goes on and on, astonishing me with the length and breadth of superficial chattering. Hours and hours of it, if you let her, although i can only manage 20 minutes or so at a time, most days. It amazes me, as I sit there, that it never occurs to her *NO ONE else is interested in this. * Amazing that she lacks that awareness. That a conversation should be a dialogue, yes? You say something, then I say something, then you say something else. The things we say are related, they fit together. This is what most people do, when they chat, but she has no need for an interlocutor, she indulges herself, the conversational equivalent of the 25 minute guitar solo on a ‘70s concept album. Perhaps because her hearing has deteriorated now, so she prefers simply to ramble on. As I sit there, feeling dutiful and tortured, I try and imagine her voice as the purring of a cat, calming me down. But these ramblings are so unpeaceable, in truth I’d rather listen to the hum of traffic, the swish of wiper blades, anything without the desperately empty content of my mother’s monologues. Samuel Beckett, perhaps, would find something there to focus on.

Last updated March 30, 2015