Operation: Child Preservation

The day I left home for college, my mother began her Campaign To Keep Me From Dying. I blame Dateline and 20/20 for being her main sources of information. Every few months, she will call me up with some new horrific way to get poisoned, mangled, or dismembered, and then lecture me on all the safety precautions I should take to avoid such a dire fate. Allow me to give you some examples.

Apropos of nothing, I have been warned to inspect any pool or Jacuzzi, before I jump in, for damaged drain covers. If I swim too close to a drain without a cover, I could be sucked towards it with such a powerful force that neither I nor several strapping young men could free me, and then I’d drown. This happened to one girl, and three (or was it six? or ten?) of her male friends couldn’t pull her away. I never seem to find myself in a pool with several strapping young men, which is another problem entirely, so I should be doubly cautious. Think a Jacuzzi is safe? Think again! If you sit on a broken drain, it’ll suck your bowels out. Apparently this is a problem claiming the lives and the innards of people across the country!

Lest ye experience a sense of false security, there are other aquatic hazards out there. Pond-dwelling brain viruses, for example.

“Did you hear about that boy who got a brain virus?” mom asked in the car one day.

“No. A brain virus? How does anyone manage to get a brain virus?” I asked. Foolish me.

“He swam in a pond. It was dirty and stagnant and smelled. They think he got water up his nose and the virus got to his brain that way. A brain virus, up the nose!”

“Huh. What does a brain virus do?”

“It rotted his brain. Now he has to live in a mental institution. Just imagine! Going into a pond normal, and coming out…” She made a face and a couple of weird noises to demonstrate the mental capacity of a person with a rotted brain.

I contemplated the perils of life for a while in silence.

“You should never swim in ponds!” mom said after a moment. “They’re not safe! They’ve got fish poop and radioactive algae and brain viruses. Only swim in pools. Pools are safe.”

“Got it.”

“Unless they have a broken drain cover, and then they can suck out your intestines.”

“What about oceans?” I asked.

“Sharks.”

Tea is also very dangerous. It can kill you, in fact. I had a lovely roommate in college who would make us a pot of tea, whether I wanted it or not, until one day I found myself actually liking it. I told my mother this because she had always loved tea.

“Be careful with tea!” she warned. “There was this man on the news who died because he bought medicinal tea and brewed it too long!”

“Mom, I’m not drinking medicinal tea, I’m drinking Earl Gray…”

“Doesn’t matter. You can’t be too careful. When brewing tea, you should read the directions very carefully. If it says to brew for two minutes, brew for two minutes. If it says to brew for three minutes, brew for three minutes…”

“Mom.”

“Some teas you can brew for even four minutes, but only if the directions say it’s OK.”

“Mom.”

“Just don’t over-brew your tea! Especially medicinal teas! They’re dangerous!”

“Mom.”

“You don’t need to take all those supplements anyway. Eat a balanced diet, and you shouldn’t need supplemental anything. Well, Vitamin C and Zinc when you’re sick. But not too much, or you could get diarrhea…”

My dear, sweet mother. Needless to say, I don’t tell her anything about all the crime in D.C., and about the dozens of ways that I could actually die here. This world is crazy, and she’s right to be worried. She can’t peek in on me as I sleep anymore, safe and sound in her own house, to assure herself that I’m all right.

My grandmother put it best. She was fussing over my dad one day until he complained that he was fifty years old and not her baby anymore.

“Gary,” she said patiently, “You are my baby, and you are always going to be my baby until the day that I die.”