I asked my Mom to meet me for lunch today so we could chat a while over coffee. To give you an idea how rarely I ask her to meet me for coffee, after I got up from my seat to give her a hug, she sat down across the table from me and, barely masking a look of concern, asked, “So, did you have something to tell me?”

I chuckled a bit at that, I hope not too dismissively, and answered, “No, it’s just that I keep saying we ought to get together, but we hardly ever do.”

Hugely relieved, she excused herself to visit the bathroom. That’s how ineptly I manage to make invitations to lunch. I’d given her the impression that I had something so momentous to tell her that she’d wanted me to hit her with the news immediately, in spite of a nagging need to pee.

When she came back, I apologized to her for not making it clear that I only wanted to meet so we could gab for a bit over coffee, not to dump the kind of awful news on her I would only feel could be done face-to-face. “I thought maybe the Air Force wanted you back,” she said. Yikes. That would be scary.

Once we got that out of the way we had a very nice lunch, and I hope it won’t be as long before I drive up to meet her again. Sometimes it seems like a long drive but sometimes I realize it’s really not, like just about any day I drive B home from work in the afternoon. It takes at least an hour and a half to go fetch her, sometimes as much as two and a half hours, because almost all the roads through Madison are under construction right now. University Avenue from Hill Farms to the western end of the campus has been torn up for months, Atwood Avenue has been torn up for a couple weeks, and this spring they tore Monona Drive out right down to the dirt and have slowly been rebuilding it all summer. And just don’t even ask about the Beltline.

If I can commute that route every day, I told myself, I can certainly drive a couple hours to have brunch with Mom, so I called her up and asked if she’d like to meet me at Cronie’s in Waupaca, a cute little coffee shop that serves a pretty darned good breakfast, too. Mom had never been there before but liked it right away. My Darling B discovered it when we were on the way home from the cabin a couple summers back. She wanted to get a little breakfast and coffee before we hit the road, so we pulled up at the first open parking spot we found on Main Street and there it was, right between Simpson’s and the movie theater. We’ve stopped there every year since.

Mom was doing well and it was awfully nice to see her again. I’ll almost be sorry if I find employment and won’t have the kind of freedom to call her out of the blue to ask her to meet me for lunch again, but that’s a worry for another day and employment’s just a dream for now.