The Thief of Time

You don't get to keep all your stuff. Sometimes it disappears all at once in the middle of the night and sometimes it just dribbles away, a little bit at a time, so you don't even know anything is missing. But people who don't see you every day notice how things have changed since the last time they were home.

Plotnik didn't write too much while he was in Stiletto this past weekend. He got in a lot of productive work with David and Kathy, the new singing voice of Angel in the Perfect Pitch...



...but his hours with Mummy P. were both fun and terribly discouraging. The Thief of Time, who is always a visitor in everybody's house, seems these days to be concentrating his efforts to take away the few niceties Mummy P. has left.

It's not all the time -- in the morning she is the same happy, friendly person she has always been but after a few cigarettes she takes to her sofa and doesn't seem to be interested in doing much of anything. You can't blame it all on smoking, but there is a cloud in Mummy P.'s house these days and the newest casualty is her reason.

She becomes overly concerned and fearful over the tiniest change in her routine. This weekend it was her file cabinets, which had become so packed they needed to be thinned out. Plotnik should have just done it and said nothing.

But Plottie still hasn't learned to treat his Mom like a child. So he asked her about it first, to let her know he was only going to remove a lot of old stuff, that didn't need to be there in the first place, from the active file and put it in another file box in the closet, leaving more space for new stuff.

This threw her into a tizzy. She accused Plotnik of wanting to throw her whole life away. He didn't care about her, he was doing things without consulting her, he didn't understand what meant a lot to her, and what didn't, so how could he know what to keep and what to throw away?

"Mom, I"m not throwing anything away. It's all still right here. I'm just making room so we can..."

"Why didn't you ask me first before you threw away my things?"

"I haven't thrown away anything..."

"What if I want to find something and now I don't know where you've put it?"

Plotnik did NOT say "Mom -- you're blind. You haven't been into those file cabinets in years. You couldn't find anything in the garbage-y mess you've got in there now if you could see, which you can't."

Plotnik did NOT say: "Mom, do you really think you'll be looking for receipts from CVS Pharmacy from 1997?"

Ducknik would try to calm her down: "Honey, he's not throwing anything away. He's just trying to..."

"Why doesn't anyone ask ME first?"

Which is, of course, the crux of the problem. You talk to her and she forgets. Then the thing you talked about happens and she thinks she has not been consulted. Mummy P. is a strong woman who has been in charge of her own things for a long time and it grinds her to feel she has been taken out of the loop.

It's not true. It's that goddam Thief of Time. He's got a lot of her memory now, but he's left all the anger about it.

And what do you do when he takes it all? When he's got everything he needed stuffed in his little fat backpack, and all you've got left is memories fighting through a cloud of smoke?