We all return to work tomorrow...ah!—blessed routine! As a sort of send off to our time away from work, Brenda and I hit the mall this afternoon.

We are hardcore shoppers. The purpose was to find a specific item from Bath and Body Works. We are hardcore skincare, fragrance, beauty line freaks. Forty-five minutes and $200 later, we headed back through the mall, and made stops in this store in that. My last dive, as Bren purchased frilly things elsewhere, was into a department store with several racks herded beneath bright "CLEARENCE!" signs.

I knew time was tight. I knew Brenda could swipe that MasterCard of hers faster than Wyatt Earp could draw. With hiccuping breath and quick hands, I clawed through the flocks to find my size. Brenda came to me as my hair escaped strand-by-strand from my ponytail and my collected drool made the descent toward the floor. Frenzied and sounding very much like Scooby Doo, I marched to the cash registers and made my purchase. Three dress shirts. Twenty dollars. I saved $75.

Leaving the store, Brenda chuckled, "Your Mom's up there loving this. You did her proud." Now my mother! SHE was a hardcore shopper! Neither Brenda nor I could stand opposite to her skills of shopping prowess, and nothing thrilled her more than a good sale...well maybe a peanut m&m with the chocolate sucked off. This was indeed a tribute. The torch has been passed.

Getting into it, I punched my bag into the air with a power-to-the-people fist and cried, "I did it all for you, Momma!"

So, I like popcorn.

Air popped.

Plain.

Thus, I have an air popper...and I think it has been my golden ticket for residence with my Aunt Brenda these six months complete. She is a popcorn lover from way back, and she was the fair maven who taught me that popcorn existed before there were even microwaves! (But not before stoves, obviously.)

The thing is, it's a pain to have to monitor the popping of the corn. It takes about two seconds shy of forever coax the little guys out of their shell using the oil-popped method, and it's quite easy to become distracted in the meandering dawdle of two seconds shy of forever...and particularly if you are of an attention deficit disorder state. Brenda, needless to say, finds popcorn popping of this fashion to be all together impossible and not a little improbable too.

The smell of burned popcorn tends to hang upon the air.

Enter the air popper:

Step one: Add popcorn.
Step two: Place bowl beneath spout.
Step three: Plug into outlet.
Step four: Walk away.
Step five: Sing a poor rendition of Aerosmith's Walk This Way.
Step six: Play the air guitar.
Step seven: Collect completed bowl of popcorn.

See? Simple. Sassy. Satisfying. The air popper is nothing short of absolutely perfect in every way. Brenda loves it, and pours the butter and salt as though they were the Promise Land's fabled milk and honey. She's had a popcorn strike going on about the house, a prohibition on the corn who would pop in the name of post-holiday waistline recovery. It's been hell.

Although I force my chosen lifestyle on no one, am outspoken on the subject not, I find it is still an issue. Yes, I am a somewhat-encyclopedia on healthful living...but if that's a resource you want to tap into, you've gotta open the cover. I don't read uninstructed. Brenda tucks her head shyly as I grab my bowl of plain popcorn and she pours the freshly melted butter over hers.

But today—TODAY!—she had a breakthrough as she glanced at a an article entitled something like Thoughts for 2006. Vindication was sweet, I am certain, as she read, "Health nuts are going to feel pretty silly lying in a hospital bed, dying of nothing."

Well, I haven't really kept it a secret, but I haven't been altogether forthright about it either: I am beginning to inherit more of my father's humor. As the years pass, I find the corny jokes come easier, timelier, and kernelier. But most upsettingly, I am beginning to laugh at his jokes way past the statute of limitations, and I chuckle at them as if it were the first time all over again. This cannot be so. I have not lived a life of sarcastic wit only to fall into the gutter trap of corn...but it appears that our futures are not in our own hands.

At Christmas dinner, a saucer holding a slab of butter shaped as an evergreen tree sat at either end of the table. Halfway through the meal, my grandmother mentioned that the butter nearest her, having taken its share of hits with the ol' knife, had come to resemble a turkey. We all looked at the butter dish somberly and nodded in agreement. My dad sat smirking at the opposite end of the spread. I looked at him, my mouth twitching already. This was going to be good or idiotic—but either would amuse, I was certain.

He raised the butter dish at his elbow and studied it with all seriousness. "And mine's a butterball," he replied. The table groaned. I was grinning like a fool and looked at Mom with wide eyes, raised brow, shrugging. I began to nod then, with great pain of acknowledgement.

"...that was actually pretty good..." I began to shake in silent laughter. My mother patted my hand soothingly.

"Yeees, Laaauuuura. It waaaaas..." she stroked my hair and blinked slowly, and you could just see the pity in her eyes.

I am becoming my father.

My grandmother is getting hearing aids. She saw the audiologist last week, and he confirmed what we've suspected for the past two decades: her hearing sucks. I was the biggest culprit for the longest time. I was the one whose speech she could almost never deter. No big shocker there...so many with hearing difficulties tell me that my voice is at a pitch that is difficult to hear. Unfortunately, one can't help the voice they were given...

She would ask my younger self a question, and I would reply shyly, my face pointed toward the ground, and draw with the toes of my shoes practiced lines across the floor. I was an exceptionally shy child—painfully so, really. It was admitted to me in my maturity that my grandparents often feared speaking to me because it might just enact me to burst into tears at being noticed. At my response to the question (hint: this would be the question I referenced in paragraph 2, line 1...just in case you got a little lost in the digression, there), my grandmother would look dumbfoundedly toward my parents for translation.

But even after I stopped mumbling and started directing my voice toward people instead of building elements, my voice wasn't something she heard overly well. I would spend a pleasant afternoon with her, yelling every moment of course, and return home with a raw throat. I became irrationally irritated in her company, and began to loathe the incessant repetition of every phrase that passed my lips. But then, the situation bettered considerably, and she began having the very same difficulties with the rest of the family too. Misery does so love company. Of course, in my grandmother's eyes, she did not have a hearing problem. No, not at all...rather, it's that we all talk too softly. The issue was with us, you see, and not her at all. That's what the doctors were told whenever they inquired, leastwise...

We became nasty little next-generationers and began to mold the situation to our satirical benefit. In our defense, it IS irritating to constantly repeat yourself, and you get to the point that you'd rather communicate via Morse Code...you know, using your head and a brick...or a corkscrew. So, there would be a running commentary on all communication plays. There would be the thunderous delivery of niceties, and the two-second follow-up of "indoor voice" scathing. Unfortunately, it has become standard. We've grown accustomed to having private conversations right under the nose of our gossipy matron. This newest development shakes me to my core.

She will now be able to hear us, but will we remember? Will the last ten years of communication protocol be reversible? It will not be easy, this much I know to be true. I am still grappling with the idea of talking to my grandmother and repeating nothing...what does one do to fill up a conversation if not repeat their last sentence three times? You don't actually handle more than one topic a conversation, do you? I mean, how can you talk about the sale on Twinkies and the cover story of the Wisconsin State Journal all in the same day!? Why, it's absurd! I am duly afraid.