They’re coming to take me away, ha ha!

My mother’s breadmaker died. She had had it for many years and used it regularly to make her daily bread. However, as all things must, it tired of its earthy existence and went to appliance heaven. My poor mother was distraught and called me up. I remind you, I live 700 kms from her. I am not in a position to drop everything and rush over there and help her out, not like my brother who lives a mere 10-minute walk away. However, because of a long, drawn-out, boring story regarding my sister-in-law and other complicated family interactions, she will not call him because she doesn’t want to a) inconvenience him, and b) get him in trouble with his wife. I just roll my eyes, but that really has very little to do with the story at hand.

So she called me up on the phone and I spent a very long time (more than an hour) looking at the Sears website and buying a horizontal breadmaker for her. She complained that her old machine gave her a loaf which was taller than it was wide and consequentially was difficult to slice. The machine which I ordered for her has a bread pan similar to the pans I used to use when I made bread the old-fashioned way, and to the machine I own myself. I ordered it online, paid for it on my account, and had it delivered to her house. She subsequently paid me back.

However, my mother, as I may have mentioned in a previous entry, suffers from advanced macular degeneration. She is 88 years old and cannot see very well. The machine is rather complicated, allowing the user to program it for different types of flour, different sizes of loaf, and colours of crust. It came with an instruction booklet which had some recipes in it, examples of how the different buttons worked for different breads. With the aid of one of her neighbours, she made a loaf of white, sandwich bread. She was very pleased. However, when she wanted to make another, she had misplaced the booklet.

My mother has a very strange way of filing things. She puts them on the kitchen table. Then they get covered up with other things and she can’t find them. This is what happened to the booklet. So she called me. Once more I spent more than an hour on the phone with her (my daughter was practically in tears because she had calls to make), finding the instruction manual online (everything can be found online) and reading her the recipe. The problem happened when it came to the particular settings required for this bread. It was a three-pound sandwich loaf. She cannot decipher the little pictures on the settings buttons, nor can she read the LCD screen. She is effectively blind. I told her that I could not help her over the phone. Sorry.

When I was next visiting, which was the morning after we’d moved Buddy Boy into residence, I examined the machine and found out what the default setting was, then I wrote in very black pencil on white paper in large, round letters a recipe for her to use, one which she could adapt by keeping the quantities constant, fill the pan, and press the “start” button. I made quite certain she knew where the button was.

Yesterday she called me in the afternoon because she’d lost the recipe. It was on the kitchen table and she could not see it. So over the phone I gave her the quantities again and wished her luck. Last night during dinner, just as I was explaining to my guests that my mother drives me crazy, the phone rang. Guess who? Yep. More problems.

This time she’d loaded up the breadmaker but couldn’t get it plugged into the wall socket. So she’d wheeled the dishwasher (she has a non-built-in one and uses the top as extra counter space) over to the stove and plugged it in there. Then she’d pressed the start button and nothing happened. So I had her unplug the machine, plug it in again and press the start button. I then told her to walk away and let it do its thing in its own time.

You see, we made one (not quite fatal) error: The recipes for this particular bread maker call for hot water. All the other breadmakers I have ever known require cold or room temperature water. Not this one. As a result the machine had to warm the ingredients before beginning the mixing process, and she said (when I called her today to see how it went) that the resulting loaf was not so “geferlich” (I have no idea what that literally means, but I think you get my drift). So, now we know better.

So when my company asked me how my mother drives me crazy--does she nag me or tell me what to do or criticize me constantly?--I had to say that she drives me literally insane because she calls me up and asks me to help her out with things that I simply cannot do at a distance. When she was having problems with her pressure cooker, she called me up. When she could not thread her sewing machine, she called me up. I love my mother and I appreciate that she thinks of me. But hell! I’m here and she’s there and it takes seven hours of hard driving for me to get to her and I simply cannot do what she wants. Hence my looming insanity.

And that is my entry for today.

|

<~~~ * ~~~>