Is listening very difficult?

Tonight's blog began in an airport and continued outside another, and then in the ride away from the latter.

I called to say my flight to Boston was delayed half an hour and that we would depart at 7:15pm rather than 6:45pm. My mother suggested that I call her once I boarded so that she could estimate arrival time and plan accordingly; I countered that it would be easier if I called her when I landed, as usual. Logan is not a car-friendly airport, and the ride from their house to Logan should not be much longer than the time it takes to deplane, etc. Mom protests that it will be cold; I say that I'll stay inside in that case and/or be fine.

My phone rings at 6:30pm.

The familiar "why haven't you called?"

"Well, for starters, we haven't boarded yet."

"You're delayed again?"

"No, the departure is still 7:15."

"You said it was 6:30!"

"I really didn't."

Okay, everyone gets times wrong. I'm bad with numbers-- if there's a numerical dyslexia, I have it. Fine, we misunderstood eachother, it was easy to take the "half-hour" in delay and take it for the time past the hour. But why turn this into an issue?

***

I arrive, call, dilly dally a little bit at a newseller's, go down to baggage claim, opt to go outside because a horrific alarm is going off by baggage claim.

I call my parents, tell them the terminal, and tell them that I'm all the way at the end of the US Airways area, that they have to go past most of the signs.

I'm fine for the first, oh, ten minutes I'm out there. Then I start to get cold. Then I start to get very cold. I can't keep calling because the signal is bad. After five more minutes or so, I see my dad, walking... the car's back a little bit.

"Where are you? We didn't see you?"

"I TOLD YOU TO GO PAST EVERYTHING ELSE!"

"We did!"

Sigh.

***

We get in the car. My dad says, "you're dressed for Washington weather!"

Have I been over this? My dad truly seems to believe that I live in a tropical paradise. Which would be fine but WE'VE BEEN OVER THIS A HUNDRED TIMES and to me this goes back to not listening.

"It's usually only five degrees warmer in DC than it is here."

"Five degrees is significant!"

Not only do I not want to keep having this conversation (I enjoy it as much as I do the one about coffee), I'm particularly annoyed by it, having braved the DC weather over the last few weeks. Sure it's no upstate New York; nor is it Miami.

I get a lecture about dressing warmly. Although I am dressed warmly, or else I wouldn't have made it the 15-20 minutes waiting for them as I did. I say something to that effect, to which my mom replies that they arrived really quickly... to which I say, no you didn't, you arrived forty minutes after the time my phone says I first called you. She says "your phone is wrong!"

Explanation for the decollage? My mother probably counts from when she got in the car. I wouldn't put it past her to have watered her plants on the way out the door, etc. But I'm being petty. Whatever, it's not about the time.

As we approach the house, my mother points out the piles of plowed snow as if it's this archeological relic to me. Normally I'd shrug it off but having spent an hour the other day trying to break the iced-over snow around the wheels of my car so I could get out, I'm just not amused, and tell her we have snow, too.

I don't know why I'm so sensitive about this-- but I think I do and I need to get over it. I have this aversion to other people's (because I don't see my own) preference for flawed assumptions, especially ones I've debunked a few times already. I don't care who thinks Washington is warm... I don't think I'm a better person for dealing with its weather. I'm not even all that sick of repeating myself; it's more that I'm frustrated that I HAVE TO repeat myself because nothing I say sticks.

I'll keep you posted throughout the weekend.