* Hearing my mother's voice in my head

You know how you hear your mother's voice in your head, like, telling you to wear a sweater or wipe your nose or red up your room?



Whenever I see a picture of someone on a San Francisco Streetcar, I hear my mother's voice in my head saying, "Fucking tourists". Then I get embarrassed. I used to visit her in San Francisco every other weekend, and streetcars and buses were her way of getting around. She had lived in the City nearly all her life, and I guess she'd had enough of tourists. She didn't like tourists using her public transit system. So, whenever we rode on a streetcar, and most especially when the streetcar was crowded, she would shove us in between some happy folks and say, so that all could hear,

"Fucking tourists."

The other thing I hear her saying happens when I see dog poop on the ground, "Ew! Shit!" which was her way of warning me not to step in dog poop when I was a kid. If her hands were free, she would point dramatically and clinch her nose when saying this.

Yet another thing that conjures maternal auditory hallucinations is when I see those signs at work, "Your mother doesn't work here. Clean up after yourself." This is very funny to me, as I've never witnessed my mother cleaning anything at all in my entire life. When I see this sign, I hear my mother's laughter when Aunt Vera (so the story goes) asked her how she cleaned under the beds when our beds had no wheels. My mother laughed because, of course, she never cleaned under beds. She couldn't imagine why anyone would.

We all have our hang-ups.


* I wasn't going to post this, but then I commented on another blog, and the security word came up as my mother's name. Divine intervention for atheists.