Waste Not, Want Not, Whatnot

Did you know that I was almost the $100 daughter?

Yeah, baby! I'm movin' on up. Mom waved a benjamin under my nose Friday afternoon at the park. As if we didn't look suspicious enough, me pulling over for her to get in the car, handing her a bag, and having that moolah fanned in my face.

She was worried about my lack of prescription medication for the weekend. At the 11th hour, aka 3:45 p.m., my workplace insurance liaison came through with an override so I would not be found on my back, legs in the air, Xs over my eyes, expired from cold-turkey blood pressure/thyroid med withdrawal Monday morning. And because one of my medications cannot be generic, it costs a pretty penny, and my only alternative was to pay cash so the robber baron insurance magnates could not succeed in my forced extermination. Let the record show that I had enough cash on hand that I did not need Mom's flesh-and-blood money. But it made her feel better to offer it.

Don't think Mom doesn't benefit in this symbiotic relationship. In the biology world, what we have would be termed mutualism. After all, I gave her two slightly-used, gently-read tabloids. And just yesterday, when she returned The Pony to his home pasture, I bagged up a plethora of goodies for her.

Mom's goody bag included a brown banana, a dozen fresh eggs from the nether regions of our very own chickens, six mini sausage biscuits of the brand which I do not like, a small untouched styrofoam container of sweet-and-sour sauce that accompanied Friday night's hot-and-sour soup crispy noodle accoutrement, and the crunchy ends of the long-gone crab rangoon. Yes. I had bitten off the business ends. Mom didn't care. I guarantee you there is no chance Rebecca DeMornay would be advocating the cessation of muffin stump deliveries at a septuagenarian shelter inhabited by my mother.

"You might not want these left-over crunchy bits, because I DID bite off them. I was saving them in case I take a frozen sweet-and-sour chicken dinner in my lunch. But I don't think I will. So you are welcome to them. I can't give you the actual crispy noodle things that go with it, because The Pony likes them. And I was going to give these sausage biscuits to Juno, but I thought I'd offer them to you first."

"Oh, they'll go just great with a batch of gravy I'm going to make tomorrow. It keeps so well in the freezer. I can have one whenever I feel like it. Here. I brought you these crusts off the deep dish Little Caesar's pizza The Pony had yesterday. He said to throw them to Juno out in the yard, but I thought I'd see if you wanted them first."

"No. I don't like their crust. Juno can have it."

I bet you'd never guess that Mom was a child of the Great Depression, huh? Like mother, like daughter. We're a thrifty bunch unless it comes down to fountain Diet Cokes. Oh, and I forgot to give her a stack of old Entertainment Weeklys. There'll be another time.

Let the record further show that Mom left a dollar-fifty for Hick in exchange for the eggs. He's the Buck-and-a-Half Son-In-Law.