Blackberry with the bathwater

The Meet-The-Parents Dinner was to take place at a Mexican restaurant in a mall in the outer East Bay burbs. I drove us all the way out to there and needed a few minutes to check my makeup and hair before going in, so when we arrived I cruised past Guadalajara Grill and parked two lots away out of view to primp privately.

Applying makeup in the rearview mirror with the feeble glow of the overhead light is awkward to begin with, and it is made significantly more awkward when you realize that you have an audience: Eric’s mother, father, aunt and uncle had suddenly appeared about 20 feet in front of us and were all looking at us sitting there in the parked car as they dropped several postcards into the mailbox which we had unwittingly parked in front of.

Rather than wave, smile or behave like a normal person, I snapped off the light, slunk down in my seat and tried to be really really still, because that was clearly how to make the best of this situation.

They hesitated for a moment by the mailbox, and then drifted slowly back towards the restaurant.

“Do you think they saw us?” I whispered needlessly.

“They were looking right at us in a lit car at night.”

“No fair!” I whimpered. “That’s not supposed to happen!”

We joined them in the restaurant a few minutes later. No one said a word about it.

Once we’d gotten past the handshake/hug fake-out greeting, dinner was actually as close to fun as I think it could have been. Dinner conversation never made it around to unicorns but we did spend an inordinate amount of time discussing mice. Eric works with mice, his dad has had some hilarious run-ins with mice, his aunt is afraid of mice and told no fewer than 17 consecutive and uniformly boring stories about her experiences with mice, and then Eric’s mother, expertly facilitating the conversation, turned to me and said “Everyone seems to have a mouse story. Do you?”

I do. It’s a story I usually tell as a whodunit thriller set in my Philadelphia apartment that starts with my discovery that, mysteriously, there are large holes in the crotches of all of my panties in my laundry basket. The story explores possible roommate passive aggression and fabric-dissolving diseases before revealing that the culprit is a mouse, and the little pervert has eaten his way through my dirty underwear.

Better judgment prevails. I choose not to upstage Eric’s aunt: I follow suit and tell another boring mouse story that goes nowhere. Eric, familiar with the Philly mouse mystery, looks visibly relieved.

And so we made it through dinner without any major gaffes.

The Denouement
It may provide some insight into my overall state of mind that then the next morning I accidentally threw my Blackberry out of our fourth story window.
I was hurriedly doing a last straightening of the apartment before heading off to work for an early meeting and I noticed that the dining room tablecloth had a few crumbs on it. I figured I would shake it out the window a bit to get it cleaned up, as we always do, and so I gathered it up into a bundle, extended my arms out the window and shook it out. I immediately knew something had gone wrong when I heard the crack of something significantly more substantial than a crumb hitting the window below ours. My Blackberry, shattered, lay strewn not just around the street below but several key chunks had ended up in the open trash cans waiting to be collected, it being Friday trash morning. I opted against dumpster-diving and, in a stroke of extraordinary luck, the Verizon woman was able to treat the accidental death and dismemberment of my phone as a warranty claim and handed me a brand new phone on the spot. This may yet be a good weekend after all, I thought.