My mother is moved in, and we are safe: I have not driven us off a cliff. It was very touch and go for a bit, as the clouds over Pennsylvania prodigiously dumped on us as I drove through the twisty roads. I am from the Midwest, you see, and am not used to things like curves and tunnels. While racing down the first tunnel I have ever driven into at sixty miles per hour, trying to elude the chomping jaws of the roadster dogging my tail, I suddenly had the strong, unshakeable feeling that I will die in a tunnel. Someday, maybe not here, but somewhere. The racing lines of the blurred brick walls; the blur of the cars beside me; the never-ending, rigid, clinical straightness of the road ahead of me; oh, this was all much too much for me. Each time I had to enter another tunnel, though it meant a brief respite from the downpour, my blood pressure level must have shot up twenty points. The boy says I’m just claustrophobic, but I think I’m not alone - why else would the tunnel be used as a common metaphor for death? The “light at the end of the tunnel,” near-death-experiencers call it. I do suspect that my claustrophobia might have had a little to do with my reaction, as well as the whole genetic paranoia thing, and the fact that I had been driving for fourteen hours.

Enough morbidity! Here are a few choice quotes from the crazy mother, over the past couple of days:

To me: “Get in the left lane! And slow down, you’re going too fast.”

To my brother: “Let me know half an hour before you need to go to the bathroom, okay?”

My mother at the wheel, heading straight towards the median.
Me: “Ahh, stay in your lane!”
Mom: “Oh. I thought we were supposed to go over there.”

Over dinner conversation:
Mom: “The boy says you’d like to live in Portland, Oregon.”
Me: “Yes, it’s a beautiful city.”
Mom: “I don’t want you to live there.”
Me: “Why not?”
Mom: “I was reading this book about tsunamis, and it says that there are tsunamis that could hit Oregon.”
Me: “But…I don’t think there have been any…at least it’s not a problem there that I’ve ever heard of. Besides, there’s nowhere you can live that’s totally safe from anything.”
Mom: “I like Hawaii.”
Me:

Me: “We can make it a lot further than Columbus, OH today, Mom. I’m not tired at all.”
Mom: “Well, we will have to make sure there’s a hotel where we stop.”
Me: “There are hotels everywhere!”
Mom: (gestures by the side of the road) “There’s not one here!”

And then there was the frantic insistence that we had to look up all the exit numbers for every single point of our trip beforehand. Ahh. Well, despite all the backseat driving, and occasional baffling comment or two, she did at least say to chiaroscuro and visual field that she thought I was a good driver. Good thing I am never doing it again!

* - Almost forgot this exchange:

When winding through the gorgeous Pennsylvania countryside, admiring the thickly forested hills:
Mom: “I think there must be lots of bears and tigers out here!”
Me: “I don’t think there are any tigers here.”
Mom: “How do you know?”
Me: “Mom, there are no tigers in America. Except in zoos.”
Mom: “Maybe we should ask someone who hunts! They would know.”

What am I supposed to say to that? How would I explain to my poor mother, who hails from a country where there conceivably are tigers lurking in the countryside, why there are no tigers milling about by the Pennsylvania turnpike? “You see, Mom, there used to be tigers here thousands of years ago, but then this thing happened called the Pleistocene Overkill…” Silly me, what would I know; I’m not a hunter!