A few days ago, my mom called. She’s at that endearing age where senior citizen meets new-fangled appliances. “Is your husband there?” she asked.

Why would she ask for him? I proceed with caution. “Why?”

“I have a question,” she replies innocently.

“Uh-huh. What is the question, and why aren’t you just asking me?”

“He fools with electronics, so I want to ask him how to wire the television to the satellite system to the VCR and TV.”

Silence while I contemplate shooting myself. “Uh…” I croak out.

“We had to move the entertainment center and disconnect some of the wires,” she chirped. “Now we can’t get everything working again.”

“And you think that we can fix this OVER THE PHONE?”

“Of course. You live 750 miles away, so we have to fix it by phone.”

“Uh, mom…”

“So,” she says brightly. “We have a few cables that aren’t plugged into anything anymore. Which one do we connect to the TV and which to the VCR?”

I hang my head. I look at my husband in desperation. He is giving me the wary eye already. I go ahead and explain to him, “Uh dear,” I say, “my mother disconnected the VCR from the satellite–”

“Oh no,” he says. “We can’t help her. What, is she crazy?”

“Just tell me where to plug it in,” mother says in my ear.

I sit down. “Okay, mom. Let’s start at the beginning. There should be a cable coming out of the wall. It’s the cable coming from the satellite on the roof. What is that cable plugged into?”

“Cable from the wall? There’s no cable in the wall.”

We go round and round until she realizes there is a cable coming out of the wall. Apparently it is the first time she has ever seen this cable in her life.

“Don’t worry about that one,” she says happily, “we didn’t move THAT one.”

“Mom, I can’t see any of this so let’s just start with that cable. What does it hook to?”

My husband interrupts. “It better hook to the satellite dish.”

“The white box,” mom says in my ear.

“Is the white box the satellite dish system?” I ask. “The one that you point the remote control at when you want to turn it on?”

“No, it’s the white box. You know, where that wire goes and then there are some plugs.”

I have no idea what she is talking about. I make her read all the labels on the box and after five minutes we finally figure out the white box is a surge protector for both the satellite signal and for regular power cords. By now, my dad has decided to “help.” What this means is extreme arguing is going on in the background.

“I didn’t unplug that one,” dad shouted. “Why would it go there? I didn’t mark that cable as “wall,” I marked it “VCR!!!”

I ignore all protests. Over the phone, we faithfully follow each cable around to its connecting part. Mind you, mom doesn’t know a power cord from a coax cable so I have to describe the coax cable as, “The round cable with the metal end that has a needle coming out the center.” That alone took 10 minutes. We go through this with every connection. My husband is yelling instructions and demanding to know what each connector says and if it is color-coded or not. We’re trying to figure out where to plug everything in– ALL WITHOUT SEEING ANY OF IT.

“No, it still doesn’t work,” mom says after we have it all arranged as perfectly as possible.

“What exactly do you mean when you say it doesn’t work?” I ask. (Note to self–Start HERE FIRST next time.)

“The VCR light doesn’t come on.”

Sinking in the pit of my stomach as I repeat in amazement, “THE VCR LIGHT DOESN’T COME ON???”

My husband glares at me. “IS IT PLUGGED IN?”

Since mom can hear my husband yell, she replies, “We just plugged in everything you told me to plug in.”

“Mom,” I say with amazing patience, “is it plugged into POWER?” My husband and I must be earning loads of tokens to heaven for this exercise.

“Power? To what?” my mother asks.

“The VCR,” I reply.

“What do you mean power? I just told you the light isn’t coming on!”

“MOM,” I scream, “THERE IS A POWER CORD FOR EACH PIECE OF EQUIPMENT.
ELECTRICITY!!!!!!! TWO PRONGS ON THE END, GOES INTO THE WALL. IS THE VCR PLUGGED IN??????”

Silence. “I thought you told me to take the cable that came from the wall and plug it into the white box.”

Where is my gun??? WHERE?

Husband is yelling. Dad is yelling. Mom is telling me that maybe she can talk my little brother (who lives 2 hours away) into coming to fix the problem. “If he hurries he can make it before the news. You know I can’t miss the news!”

“Mom,” I say again. “You have to plug the VCR power cord into the wall or into the surge protector.”

(Mom has already forgotten what the surge protector is. I convince her to plug it into a wall outlet just to make it easier.)

“Hey,” she reports happily, “the little green light came on!”

We have power! Okay. Now we go through the motions of trying to “power” everything else up–Ah, but there aren’t enough wall outlets nearby–so of course I have to explain once again what the surge protector is and how to use it.

“I plugged the TV into the white box, but it won’t turn on,” mom informed me.

“AHA,” I shout. “The surge protector is blown!” (Either that or it shot itself at the beginning of this exercise.)

“Oh, well if that is the broken thing, that’s easy,” mom says. “Tell me how to cable around it because I CANNOT be without my TV…”

I try to think of these calls as quality family time. I try to remember her endless patience when I was a child and she had to wait for me to dress, to eat or learn to ride my bike. It’s that or move next door so that every time the toaster isn’t plugged in I can send my husband over to do it.

Did we get the TV working in time for the news?

Well, yes. But it took another half-hour of quality time spent together on the phone.

I try to visit my parents on their desert cattle ranch in New Mexico whenever possible. Occasionally, I out-clever myself and we meet somewhere. One year, that place was Palo Duro Canyon State Park in the Texas Panhandle.

My husband and I arrived at the cabin first. It was a nice stone building tucked along the top of the chasm. Outside, beautiful red-rock Spanish skirts decorated the landscape. Inside, two bedrooms were separated by a three-foot hallway. Strangely, there were no doors on either end of the short hallway. A sink and toilet was on one side of the hallway. Directly across from it, another glass door covered a shower. Anyone getting out of the shower had to step directly into the open hallway. If you were using the toilet, anyone walking through the very short hallway could see what you were doing. Then again, if you’re in the bathroom, I guess they already know what you are doing.

My husband and I moved our things into the room with the microwave and refrigerator because it had a double bed. The other room had a daybed with a twin stowed underneath. My parents tend to fight over who is hogging the bed when they try to sleep in a double. I figured they’d be happy about the twin beds and mildly unhappy about the strange engineering concept that put all the electronics in our room…their room had a light, but not a single electric outlet.

Since I had expected mom and dad to arrive an hour earlier, I hiked about a mile to the public telephone booth near the ranger station and reached dad on his cell phone. What followed was a typical father/daughter communication with a bad connection thrown in. “Where are you?” I asked.

Dad replied, “Highway forty, almost there.”

Since highway forty doesn’t lead to the park, “almost there” didn’t make any sense. As long as dad knows where he is, he can be maddeningly inexact. “Almost where?” I asked.

“Almost to Amarillo,” he replied. “I guess we’re going to stop and get dinner.”

“I thought we were going to grill food here?” I said.

“What?” he crackled back.

“Weren’t we going to grill?”

“Well, I don’t know where we are going to stop,” he replied. “We might get something grilled.” More crackling while I hinted that they had the food.

“I guess we can bring you some food.”

“No, I said…” The connection crackled. “Hello? Hello?” It was gone. Died. Calling back would do no good. Parents never listen to their children anyway.

I hiked back to the cabin and reported the development to my husband. Mom and dad had agreed to bring a cooler with steaks and burgers. My husband and I only had buns, potato salad and silverware.

“So what should we do?” he asked. “Eat potato salad?”

The wind was picking up and we didn’t really want to drive to Amarillo in search of a meal. If we were delayed and my parents arrived before we returned, we had the only keys to the cabin.

We waited. Two hours later, we were starved.

Dad’s only comment upon arrival was an innocent, “I didn’t know you were waiting for us to bring the food.”

“I told you we had the food,” my mother asserted.

“But weren’t you hungry?” he asked her.

“It doesn’t matter,” I interjected. “We have the food now.” It was seven o’clock and the wind was blowing very hard, which made it difficult to get the charcoal hot enough to grill.

While my husband and I ate, dad told us about the Italian restaurant in Amarillo. “It didn’t look like much and they had plastic forks, but the food was darn good!”

Mom agreed. “I didn’t want to stop there at all. Italian food is so expensive. I was just going to get a salad, but they had spaghetti and breadsticks. I could have eaten a dozen of those breadsticks.”

“And the price was right!” dad added. “You should drive up to Amarillo before you head back home and try it.”

“What was it called?” I asked.

They looked at each other. “Oh let’s see.” Dad scratched his almost gray hair. “It was–do you remember?”

Mom frowned. Her hair isn’t as gray as dad’s and she perms it so she has those little old lady curls. “No.”

The breadsticks and plastic forks rang a bell in the back of my mind. “Fazolis?” I guessed.

“That’s it!” they both shouted.

“How did you know?” my mom sputtered. “I thought you said you hadn’t been to Amarillo before!”

“It’s a chain,” I said with a grin. “You guys need to get out more often.”

It was downright blustery outside so we went inside to tell stories about growing up on the ranch and all the creepy crawling bugs and rattlesnakes that are in the desert. My husband, from tame Wisconsin, was not overly inspired by our enthusiast tales of survival.

Before long, a discussion started on the cabin design.

“Even if the second room was an add-on they could have put in electricity. The electrician must have been lazy,” dad decided.

“I guess the guy putting in doors was lazy too,” my husband said.

We examined the door frames to see if doors had ever been attached. “Maybe we could take the door off the water-heater closet and latch it onto the hallway opening,” I suggested.

Dad stroked his gray day-old stubble thoughtfully. “If you had thumbtacks you could at least hang a blanket. But my tacks are in the truck. We brought the car.” He carefully searched the cabin, but didn’t find tacks. All the while he mumbled, “You get out of the shower, your naked butt will be hanging out for all the world to see.”

From the look on my husband’s face, I was pretty sure he was not excited about this possibility.

Though we all stared at the doorway long and hard, no solutions appeared. The opening loomed.

(more…)