Wake-up calls

Some people get really nervous when they receive phone calls late at night, as such calls are harbingers of unsettling news. I, on the other hand, fear phone calls before 8:00 AM, especially those from my mother, and especially since my father has cancer. My mother's skewed mindset makes her wait hours to reveal important, serious, and upsetting information until the early morning, when she knows I should be awake and getting ready for work. This is how I found out about my grandmother's death, while she got the call several hours earlier.

Not only do I dread these calls because of what information they relay, I also freak out TEN FOLD because I'm usually still asleep when she calls me.

I have gotten two early-morning calls from her in the past week, but they were not of the bad-news variety. Last week, she called to ask if I knew anyone who went to Northeastern Illinois University, and I had no idea what she was talking about, because it was 7:10 and I had been hitting the snooze button on my alarm for an hour. When I told her no, she replied, "Okay! Just checking! Have a good day!"

This morning it happened again. I had asked her to Tivo the broadcast of Company on Great Performances last night (fag.) since I don't get PBS (seriously!). She called at 7:00 to tell me that she forgot until it was a half-hour into the show, and then she set up the recorder, figuring I'd be fine missing the opening, or something. Then she realized that she recorded the wrong channel. Ha ha ha!! Isn't that funny?! CLICK.

It's one thing for her to save me the emotional burden of waking me up in the middle of the night to give me terrible news, but it's quite another thing to set up some sort of pattern and then, in a weird Boy-Cried-Wolf sort of way, freak the hell out of me at seven in the morning when she's driving to work and wants to think out loud over the phone.