1995 Mom's Caps

Monday, September 8, 2008

Walked with Peter this morning. Perfect weather.

I don't know what made me think of it, it's not something I've thought of in years, decades even, but I've been thinking about a weird habit? characteristic? anomaly? whatever the word I'm looking for - about my mother.

She couldn't keep caps on anything, especially small caps.

Back when we used fountain pens, her nibs were always dried up, because the first time she used a pen, the cap disappeared.

She used to buy packages of Bic ballpoint pens, the kind with the separate caps. There'd be ten or twelve of them lying around, and none of them worked when you needed it, because none of them had caps, and they all dried up. We'd get her click-type ballpoints, and they'd dry up because she never clicked the point back into the barrel, and the points got all dust-fuzzy.

She hated the felt tip and nylon tip pens, because they bled all over everything, because they didn't have caps.

Bottles of ketchup and salad dressing sat in the refrigerator with twists of foil on top, because the caps had disappeared. Soda went flat.

The toothpaste tube in the kids' bathroom had a cap. The toothpaste in our parents' bathroom never had a cap.

This was true for quite literally everything! I would get so frustrated with her, because when none of her pens would write, she'd borrow mine "just for a moment" and it would come back with no cap. "Where's the cap?" "I don't know. Was there one?"

Her house was always clean and neat. There was no clutter. My parents were used to moving every three years or so (Air Force), so they traveled light. And yet those caps disappeared. Evaporated into thin air. Mom would have a pen in her hand for five minutes at the kitchen table, didn't move from the table, and yet the pen's cap would disappear. Not on the table, not on the floor, not in the trash, nowhere. And we'd never see it again. You'd think we'd find a bunch of them when we cleaned, but we never did.

Somewhere in some other dimension, there's a huge pile of my missing socks - and a small heap of bottle, tube, and pen caps.
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