Do other people's parents do this?

So I'm sitting at Mothers' Day brunch with Mom and Dad because, you know, I'm a good son and stuff and I bought a plane ticket to come home. But we're sitting there talking and Dad starts asking if I think it's odd that all these people I've known in one way or another have all moved to DC (although some of them have already moved away again). I respond that DC's kind of a way station for a lot of people my age, that it's a transitory place, that people move there for four years or whatever and then they move on.

But then, then, Mom starts to chime in with this anecdote about, well, there's the problem. Because Mom doesn't remember stuff very well anymore. So she starts to tell me this anecdote, but first she has trouble remembering the people's names whose child it is she's trying to remember, but then at least she gets the parents' names, but for the child (who is only my contemporary by the very broad criterium that she was a child of somebody roughly my parents' age) the effort fails. So the daughter whose name cannot be remembered, and whom I never really knew, now lives in Washington, or actually what was that place I lived before I moved? "Crystal City." Oh yeah, that's it. She lives in Crystal City. Mom said they were supposed to get my address or email address for the daughter whose name they don't remember. She's a lawyer, and she works for, uh, she works for somebody there.

All of Mom's anecdotes are told this way, as are some of Dad's. He's actually a bit better in this regard than she is. I don't know what's worse about them (the anecdotes, not my parents), the complete lack of any salient fact that would make them anecdotes and not fill-in-the-blankdotes, or the general assumption that I not only remember the parents (usually some lawyer and his wife, an endless stream of whom passed before me during my childhood of annual bar conventions), but their children - most of whom were age peers to Mark or Emily, but definitely not to unplanned, late-conceived me. I was always the youngest tagalong on all the bar convention trips by at least the 6 years separating me and Emily, if not more.

So while many of the other lawyers and their families remember me quite well (I was never one not to make a spectacle of myself), I frankly am lucky to remember anybody's name from that period. There are many stories in my family that basically revolve around me doing something memorable on whatever [outing|vacation|bar convention] and how people who were present at any of those ask about me and then recount how they'll "never forget the time ..."

There was an other Mom anecdote in the car on the way home from brunch, but it didn't even get as far as the one about the lawyer's daughter who may or may not be named Lynn and who may or may not live in Crystal City.

link (2000-05-14)