Book excerpt:
For most of the years when I was growing up we had no telephone. One reason for this was that for many years we couldn’t afford one. Another reason was that my "mother" had a poor memory about who she had called and believed people were breaking into the house to use our phone to call long distance. Her argument with the phone company over the bill would end with her demand that the telephone be taken out of the house immediately.
Other times she had the telephone taken out because, when she answered the phone, strangers would sometimes insist they had called the wrong number, an excuse she never accepted. Those calling had not innocently misdialed a number. They were part of an international plot to force her to divulge the secret behind the Amelia Earhart disappearance.
“ I don’t know who they are but, they’re doing it deliberately,” she would say. “They’re trying to torment me, mean, spiteful people. I don’t know what it is they think I know.”
She got into the habit of trying to disguise her voice when she answered the phone so the people trying to bedevil her would not get the satisfaction of knowing that they were talking to the right person.
She once asked the telephone company for an unlisted number, but on learning it would mean an extra charge on our telephone bill, she settled for removing the number from the telephone handset, arguing that it would prevent anyone breaking into the house from copying the number off the wheel that dialed the number. Why anyone would break in the house to learn our telephone number when they could look it up in the telephone directory she didn’t say and I didn’t have the moxie to ask her.
She habitually looked at the dark side of an action or a coming event and found it.When I was nearing my graduation from grade school, she warned me not to be surprised to find I had been given a blank diploma. “They hate us in this parish because we live in a little house. Don’t think for one minute they’re going to let you graduate.”
She lived in a cruel world of perpetual darkness. Sunshine was wasted on her.
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