It's a world of laughter, a world of tears...

I have grown up constantly being warned by my mother and grandmother that they are omnipresent--if I ever were to do something untoward, they would find out through their mysterious powers. And while I still lived within a 100 mile radius of the matriarchs of my family, I often did not want to chance it.

My mother likes to tell a story from her teenage years: Not exactly being the wild and crazy type, my mother and her friends misused some shopping carts as vehicles in the local grocery store parking lot, far from the watchful eyes of my grandmother, only to return home to my grandmother's speech about how embarassed she was to know that her child was making such a scene. This story served its purpose; I spent my formative years in fear that they knew everything that I did. Eight hundred miles away now, I feel relatively secure that their powers don't extend quite this far.

Over Labor Day weekend, I attended a wedding of a high school friend in suburban Detroit. I knew no one at the wedding-- being the sole high school friend of the groom to attend--and I made a brief accquaintance with only a few others. Over this past weekend I opened the door to my friend's apartment to see the bride's cousin sitting at my friend's dinner table, a friend of a friend of my friend, apparently.

Not exactly my mother's ominpresence, but it does make me wonder that maybe eight hundred miles is not quite enough to escape her powers. It's a good thing I behaved at that wedding.