FAMILY/HUMOR

Laughing Your A** Off Always the Best Option

Just make sure you’re facing the proper direction

This starts out as a sweet, but sad, story. But it picks up, I promise.

I looked down at the hard copy of the email I’d printed out before the meeting. We’d just helped Mama sell her Capitol Hill row house, and I was nervous that I’d forget the address for the closing.

Our mom had decided to pull up stakes and move closer to my sister and her husband across town.

She’d been living in the inner city by herself for longer than we’d been comfortable with. After my Dad’s death a few months before, my sis and I sat down with Mom and asked her about her plans.

Mama wasn’t thinking all that clearly. She’d lost her soulmate of more than 50 years. As she contemplated selling her house in D.C.’s Historic District, she had a difficult time imagining a way forward.

All Mom really knew is she didn’t want to live in the “damn suburbs”.

She’d done that eons ago, for the “good of the kids”. She didn’t like the newness, even in neighborhoods decades old. And she abhorred the sameness of it all.

That’s why, you see, as my folks got older they did things differently and almost always took the road less-traveled.

That meant that while friends they’d known for years were retiring to sunny Florida, coastal South Carolina and South Padre Island, Mom and Dad moved into the renovated 19th-century hideaway equidistant from the U.S. Capitol and my house about a mile away.

It’s always all in a name, isn’t it?

My folks ran toward family as they aged. If we’d had a big enough abode, I’m sure they would have taken a page from the traditions of extended households in Asia and Latin America and moved right in with us.

We spent years walking to see “The Babas”. Well, really, it was “Baba” if my kids were talking about my mom, their grandmother, and “Grandpa Baba” if they were talking about Daddy. When both grand-parentals came up in conversation, they were known, natch, as “The Babas”, or “Both Babas”.

No clue on the origin of that honorific — But I also know that on occasion my kids would refer to my folks as “The Bobs”. Cute, huh?

Why did we have to ruin it all by moving to the ’burbs?

But then Moker and I had to wreck any semblance of small-town, big-city serenity and move — mimicking Mom and Dad’s choice when they were younger — to the ’burbs. For the kids, of course. But also for my peace of mind.

I guess I should point out right here, right now, that I had a lot of guilt wrapped up in the outcome of this particular move.

Our eldest had a decent-sized bedroom at our place in D.C. but not large enough to share. So Ella Numera Una slept in a “room” at the end of the hall, whose dimensions equaled those of a teeny, tiny walk-in closet. Or maybe a lean-to that had been slapped on the back of the house for storage. You know, for Victorian-era fireplace tools and coal, or something. Don’t think central heat/AC existed when the original part of our house went up in the mid-1800s.

And so we moved about 10 miles away from “The Bobs”, and then when it came time for Mama to leave her smallish, quaintish historic home, she was having none of our cookie-cutter Northern Virginia colonial. On a cul-de-sac. A block down the street from the elementary school. Mayberry personified.

Even D.C., though, has a cookie-cutter aesthetic.

Which brings me back to Mom, and her Capitol Hill row house, and its sale, and her move. She found a place up in Northwest D.C., next door to my sister and her hubby in a 1920s-era building near the National Cathedral. That’s the good thing about D.C. — until you leave the city’s boundaries, say for a domicile across the Potomac in Virginia, your chances of finding somewhere interesting to live are high. And I know Mama appreciated that about her new digs.

We listed Mom and Dad’s house on the Hill, and it sold pretty quickly. And I had been designated to attended the closing, acting as Mom’s representative.

I stood in the lobby of a cookie-cutter office building, as common to downtown D.C. as its history and iconic views are elsewhere, and read through the email one more time. The Realtor’s name was Angela. Coincidence or serendipity?

Oh, Barbie, please say it wasn’t so!

When Moker and I had put our D.C. home of a dozen years on the market, it wasn’t a flawless process, but we did the deed in time to move in August, right before school started. It was all so long ago, but I only vividly recall one particular part of the transition from city to suburbs.

I seem to remember this one enthusiastic woman who worked for our real estate broker, and she wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. She basically didn’t care if the living room was tidy. She always had a “feeling” about the folks she brought by. And she “popped in” more than once while the “for sale” sign hung in our front yard. Didn’t call ahead; barely tapped on the door before using her key to let prospective buyers in.

A real go-getter. And she and the young couple she had in tow one day got a real eyeful before closing on the deal.

I vaguely recollect straightening the living room one Saturday morning. In fact, this activity and what came next are etched on my temporal lobe all these years later.

I was picking up “crippy-crappy”, wearing an oversized T-shirt and not much else. The kids were in the kitchen, probably throwing Cheerios at the cat.

One of Barbie’s accessories had skittered under the couch — I could just see a piece of over-priced neon plastic peeking out. I turned around, back to the front door, and bent over to retrieve the tchotchke to throw in the pink plastic tub where we stored such items.

Tap-tap. Click. That’s all it took. In seconds, and before I could arise from a very revealing position and rearrange my T-shirt, a Realtor — wait, was her name Angela? — and two clients were standing in my living room.

All I can say is I behaved like a real ass.

No one ever told me straight-up I had committed an act of in flagrante delicto that morning, but I’m pretty sure I did. And it didn’t really matter. Angela’s clients were charmed, if not by my fairly accurate impression of a flasher, then by our mid-century family perch, circa 1847. They say a prospective buyer shouldn’t reveal too much if they like a house, but I don’t think anyone ever said anything too much about revealing seller protocols.

We have all been here before. Or have we?

Let’s wrap this up with Mama and her house sale. It all went down about 10 years after we’d made our move to the ’burbs.

I punched the “Up” button. I got off at the fifth floor and announced my presence to the gal behind the desk. She led me to a conference room and I sat down at the large table.

Three people — our Realtor Louise and two other women — came in. I noticed a gleam of recognition in the eyes of the one with frosted hair.

“Brooke, so great to see you!” Louise enthused. “Do you know Angela?”