Larry King was gently scolding Al Gore. CNN Larry King Live was blaring from my mother’s opaque Panasonic twenty-five inch screen. Electrons danced across this colander of 21st century entertainment. Cable television munificence clashed with dancing electronic intruders. Bounteous contradictions were everywhere evident.
It did not matter, though, because my mother only accessed one third of her available channels. The effort to ingress more exotic offerings in the upper channels was fatuous anyway. From Mom’s perspective, she only needed CNN, the Weather Channel, and the History Channel. Even the local news did not interest her now. This was all the entertainment she needed and, to her, news was entertainment. Mom was dying of pancreatic cancer.
Lying under a crocheted brightly colored afghan knitted by her mother, affectionately called Big Momma by all other generations, mom was obviously defeated by the cancer interlopers who had completely subdued her body and were now skirmishing with her spirit. With her blonde frosted wig slightly askew on her forehead mom very much appeared the defeated warrior.
She needed the bright color in the afghan to tease vigor from her emaciated frame and color from her pallid skin. Big Momma had shamelessly knit bright chartreuse, gold, and pinks into her afghan. Her cacophonic choices doomed the afghan to family coffers or to the most destitute recipient who had no ardor for natural, appealing, subtle hues or had no affordable choice anyway. My mother’s body, naturally big boned but until recently pudgy, unnaturally jutted out from loose knitted afghan perimeters. Her angular right knee was lassoed by a frayed portion of Big Momma’s much used, little appreciated afghan. It looked like a reptile peeking through the burnished flora of a viscous jungle thicket.
It suited my mother just fine now, though. She herself felt frayed, tattered, and very old. She also felt used and useless. In the dim hue of Larry King Live the afghan and my mother had a bizarre, surrealistic demeanor that accurately depicted the environs of her crumbling world.