“What are you doing?” my mother yells at me as I head toward the kitchen sink to get water, coffeepot in hand.
“I’m going to make us some coffee.”
“That’s not how you do it!” she says, her voice raising a few octaves and with a sense of urgency.
Actually, it is how I do it. It’s how most people do it. It’s not how my mother does it.
And, as I’ve come to realize during my visit home — not the home of my youth, but the home my parents have made in South Florida — is that my mother does a lot of things in what can only be described as “how you do it,” aka the right way. And there can be no variation on the theme.
My mother, less than a month away from turning 80, has become rigid.
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