Mother's Bad Date [patched] File

“Next time,” she said, finishing the last of the pistachio, “I’m bringing you. You can make faces at him from across the table.”

We both burst out laughing. And in that moment, I realized: a bad date isn’t a failure. It’s just material. My mother put the wilted carnation in a juice glass on the windowsill, where it looked, somehow, not sad but defiant. mother's bad date

She was back by 8:47.

My mother is a retired kindergarten teacher. She has spent thirty years explaining to small children why you shouldn’t lick windows. Her patience is legendary. But I could see the twitch in her left eye. “Next time,” she said, finishing the last of

“He also said,” she continued, “that he once broke up with a woman because she named her cat after a punctuation mark. The cat was named ‘Comma.’” It’s just material

“The final straw,” she said, taking a massive bite of ice cream, “was when he told me I’d look younger if I smiled more. And then he corrected my pronunciation of ‘bruschetta.’”