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She Set Her Alarm For The Precise Moment Of The Daylight Savings Time Change
brilliant or zany?
Every year when daylight savings time rolls around, I think of the story a former roommate told me about her mother.
Toni was my roommate. She would pounce on me hard if she caught me in a misstep. I knew the word chihuahua but I don’t remember ever seeing the word in print. One day I read it from the newspaper and pronounced it exactly as it looks. I said ‘chi- who a- who- a’. She went after me so hard. And she never let it go.
I also remember not pronouncing the word worship correctly. My family is from the Appalachia region of the United States. And I had, for most of my life, lived in very rural areas. I said the word like my family does: “wa… ship” the ‘ah’ rather than ‘or’.
Both of those times and others she was relentless in her harsh teasing and never letting me forget it.
And she was very talkative and a lively storyteller. She told a never-ending litany of stories about her mother’s antics. All of these made her mother seem not quite competent.
When her mother would visit our apartment, she would look at and talk to the fake birds that were in my birdcage that was hanging from the ceiling.
