Nom de Plume

This is something, by the way, that I tell her on a regular basis and she says, “Well, at least you inherited it legitimately.”

So. My mother is going to Iraq. I’m still not precisely sure what she’s doing, but it has something to do with leading a team out in the field to help put democracy in place.

Personally, I think she just likes the idea of flying in there wearing a flak jacket. Wayne, on the other hand, is beside himself. The last I heard from him was an e-mail in which he mentioned her appearing on an al-Jazeera feed not once, or even twice, but three times. Okay, it was a pretty long e-mail.

It’s not that I’m not worried. When she called to tell me my father had died — I remember this vividly — I was in the grocery store, and I knew what she was going to tell me, so I sat down at the blood pressure machine. People were walking by with their shopping carts, prosaic lists in hand. I said, “Well, it’s just us now.” And it was — still is. She’s an only child; I’m an only child. Sure, I have Steve and she has Wayne, but in terms of blood relatives, there are distant cousins … really, she and I are it. Which is a long-winded way of saying that I would be devastated should something happen.

But as she likes to point out, danger is a relative term. We take our lives in our hands every single day just by getting into a car. Getting on her horses to ride can be dangerous, especially with a replaced hip. Flying somewhere is dangerous. (She also felt the need to point out that me running around in USA 57, the LandRover I drove in Freetown, after curfew with stoned 16-year old soldiers with AK47s manning the roadblocks was dangerous. I prefer not to remind myself of how stupid I was at 18.)

And here’s the thing: she’s so happy about going and doing some good that it’s hard not to be happy for her. We have made plans to meet in Jordan for her next R&R and she has just bought an iPod for the extremely spartan living conditions.

It was actually pretty cute; she called me to ask how to turn up the volume.