Phone With Grandma (Blue Eyes)
Posted by beehive on 14 May 2008 at 11:29 am | Tagged as: Uncategorized
The other day was my Norwegian grandmother’s 88th birthday, and so I called her when I got home from work to wish her a happy birthday because I knew it would be too long a conversation to have at work.
There’s never a short conversation with her. Things always lead back to Norway, very distant relatives that I’ve never heard of before and will never see, and her health - usually her backaches that she refuses to take muscle relaxers for and just wishes better.
It’s not that I don’t want to hear about these things it’s more so the fact that she dominates phone conversations to the point where the person she’s talking to just gives up and ends up riding her words out as an avid or sometimes barely active listener.
I remember watching my dad talk to her growing up and him just being so frustrated and angry trying to get a word in edgewise. Having seen this growing up I know that no matter how hard I try to participate in the conversation, she’ll just ignore me or change the topic along, so I just give up quickly in the battle.
So after being on the phone with her for ten minutes and not getting anything in other than a “Yeah” “Uh huh” “Right” here and there I decided to take photos of myself as I experienced the conversation over the course of several minutes.
Clearly I’m not having fun.
Yes, I’m still slightly frustrated over lack of being an equal in phone conversations with her.
Please God, make this conversation end…
Ugh…this is never going to end…
Watch my face over the next few photos as I completely fade off into the world of zoning out at the camera…
I have no idea what the heck she was talking about there.
Then I remembered that making a farty face makes things slightly better.
And then back to zoning out…
Isn’t this the face of a defeated phone linguist…?
My head began to hurt from the frustration.
So I then decided to start playing my wrestling matches on Facebook.
But my beloved Facebook wrestling matches couldn’t save me…
Thankfully my cat realized that I was in trouble and began to tap my arm with her paw…
She was meowing real loud and I assume trying to tell me that I should just hang up the phone without even saying good bye.
But I couldn’t hang up on my grandmother - especially on her birthday!
As you can see, my cat is a persistent one.
She even resorted to just rubbing her head against me to tell me to do more fun things like rub her tummy.
Here’s when my mind clicked back to being aware of my surroundings. Around this time I had also realized that I just should have called her after 8PM when her game shows are on and she would have rushed me off the phone.
Wait! WTF?!?! She’s wrapping things up! What time is it?
It’s 7:53PM, and done! Good bye!
VICTORY!!!
USA! USA! USA!!
Perhaps another name for these photos could have been simply, “Blue Eyes”.
Also, is it just me, or is a five o’clock shadow coming in noticeably thicker as the conversation goes on?
My Grandma can talk forever too. Invariably the conversation always turns to premarital sex and AIDS. She always wants reassurance that I’m still a virgin, st which point the conversation sort of trails off becuase I can’t just barefaced lie to my granny, but she really doesn’t want to hear the truth so…
Your cat is so cute! Unfortunately, that is how I feel about talking to almost EVERYONE on the phone. I’m just not a phone person.
I have to admit that my Grandmother rushes me off the phone when I call in to see how she is doing. She’s 91 now and still lives by herself and runs all around her neighborhood to the various places of destination that make up her routine. The downside is that I am never quite sure that she is wearing the hearing aids when I call, but perhaps she doesn’t want to. I’ve noticed she hears “selectively” based on the topic. She doesn’t talk about Norway which is good since we’re Russian but she is not from over there either, the Great-Grandparents were. At this stage the topics of conversation are the same: how was work, did I eat, how are the cats, am I going anywhere tonight, don’t stay out too long and these are capped off by what’s on television or not, and who called or did not. Given she can keep all of this to under ten minutes with me, I am convinced that she now has it on a checklist and runs down it while we speak.
It was amusing to see that your cat does the same thing as my own when on the phone. They clearly don’t like the fact that the device takes away from potential attention to them.