Lucy and I took a quick trip out to visit my folks in Florida this past weekend. We flew out Saturday morning to West Palm Beach, picked up our rental car and drove up to Vero in time for lunch. Dad set us up at the Holiday Inn with a room facing the ocean, a couple of patio chairs and a small table where we could enjoy the view. We met for dinner and kept things simple. We stayed all day Sunday, having breakfast and dinner with my folks and were back in Houston at 8:00am Monday in time to pick up some business; provided the phone rings, so we only missed one day of work.
We had plenty of time to visit without wearing anyone out, tough to do when you’re away from them so long. I noticed my mom had the La Boheme DVD we’d sent sitting on a table in the entry way; not exactly looking the way it should as I inquired, “Did you get a chance to enjoy it?”
There was something not quite right as I picked it up, mom looked at her shoes and I knew she had not gotten that far. The protective plastic which is part of the DVD case was missing which meant the printed jacket cover no longer was being held to the case. Knowing my folks as I do, I started to laugh. The plastic had not been ripped off; no, it had been carefully, almost lovingly removed in such a way as to make you wonder how it had been removed without leaving the slightest evidence of trauma, rough edge or burr.
“I couldn’t figure out how to get the case open so I started trimming; but it still wouldn’t open.” This woman was a surgical nurse, worked in the operating room handling scalpels and other tools of destruction. She never said how she’d attacked the “challenge”; but that DVD was somewhere inside, under the jacket cover as she removed a layer at a time, just as a surgeon would have gone at it where it alive.
I took another DVD jacket and switched the printed covers so La Boheme is now “whole”, its jacket once again protected by a thin plastic film. Mom got to enjoy the opera as I set it up to play on my laptop; her DVD player is hooked up to dad’s television and it was time for the ball game. I’ll find one of our not so great DVD’s and do yet another swap.
Later that evening when we met at the Manatee, a nice seafood restaurant on the Point, they told me they had my laptop in the trunk of dad’s car. Mom couldn’t figure out how to get the DVD to eject when the opera ended. I let out a breath slowly, remembering how she’d taken on the challenge of the DVD jacket. I was lucky, the laptop was still intact; she’d turned it upside down, sideways and never figured out where the DVD was hidden so the scalpel was never used this time.
It’s probably a good thing they don’t have a computer; books they’re good at, you turn a page and read, turn a page and read. Note to self: Remind me not to buy them a Kindle .
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