70 Days of Mom — A Tale of Quarantine — Episode One
Episode 1 — The Concert.
She’s 82 years old, weighs 95 pounds, and stands a towering five feet tall. Her wingspan in the kitchen is about 23 feet wide and easily guards the coffee maker, silverware, stove, and six cabinets with an impenetrable field of guilt and foul-mouthed intimidation. You will be served with the efficiency of the Soup Nazi and you WILL like it. She’s my mother. God save us all.
Visits from my mother are usually anything but ordinary, but this one definitely started out on a now unforgettable Saturday, March 7th, 2020. That was the day I was to pick her up for a Celine Dion concert in bustling, downtown Newark, NJ. Two weeks before she saw her in Atlantic City and decided she hadn’t had her fill with the Queen of the Titanic so she harassed my brother, Bill, to go see her again. Neither of us wanted to go but that wasn’t going to stop Annie from getting her way.
“Robert, I’ll buy the tickets.”
“Annie,” I started. “You drive a hard bargain.” Really, how could a good son say “No”?
And so on that beautiful Saturday, I drove about two hours to meet my brother and have him drop off “the package” in Newark. There were only a handful of details discussed about the exchange and we decided it best to call each other during the…
