mallorys_camera | If Youth Only Knew, If Age Only Could...

Continuing in my pissy mood today. Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s good. I guess I’m just one of those people who goes about wanting to randomly smash people’s heads into the wall a certain percentage of the time. Must be my Scorpio moon. The rest of the time I’m a pussycat.

Maybe it’s just autumn.

The Future Mother of My Unborn Grandchildren is coming to visit for a couple of days next week and I’m trying to think of ways I can spoil her without seeming too officious.

Liza’s coming to New York without Max who has a fairly demanding job these days. She and I have never really spent any time together, so I decided to invite her up here to get the opportunity to know her a little. Check out her teeth. Measure her thighs. Administer the Stanford Binet. All those things that prospective mothers-in-law need to do to make sure their sons’ choices are good breeding stock.

Ha ha.

“She’s very nervous about visiting you,” Max told me on the phone last night. Squeals of girlish protest in the background. “She doesn’t want to you to know, of course –"

“Put Liza on the phone,” I said. “Hello, Liza. You should be nervous to meet me. In fact, you should be terrified because I’m going to spend 72 hours judging you –“

This was a joke, of course, but possibly the wrong kind of thing to say because it’s not clear to me that Liza has a sense of humor.

“But seriously, Liza, Max is the one who should be nervous because I’m going to share all his childhood secrets with you –“

This time she laughed.

One of my conceits is that I get along very well with people who are much younger than me. That’s probably a delusion. Older people are really quite irrelevant to younger people. Give us half a chance and we’ll start nattering about the way things used to be.

You didn’t invent it! I want to tell them. We were just like you only we used different technology!

Most of the time, though, I’m successful in shutting myself up, smiling vaguely when they get passionate.