The Scottish Play

"The Scottish Play" is theatre code for "Macbeth", as it is considered unlucky to mention it by its real name. [There is a VERY funny scene in the third season of Black Adder that refers to this superstition.]

"The Scottish Play" also happens to be Purple Ferns code for my mother. Though I have broken all ties with her, I guess really I haven't, as I haven't made that final step of changing our phone number to an unlisted one. I guess I feel that since my brothers already both have unlisted numbers, it behooves me to keep mine listed--should any estranged family members who we would actually want to hear from try to look us up. Maybe some day we'll be called to let us know that our uncle has died, for example. Though at this stage in my life I don't think I would travel to the funeral. But I would send flowers. And it's unlikely that some long lost cousin is thinking about us.

Anyway, the Scottish Play hasn't been calling much (knock on wood!--one thing I got from her is being oddly superstitious), but she did call twice in a row the other day. In one of the messages she referred to me as Lenore (one of my aunts' name). And so it's no surprise to me that she ended up in one of my dreams. I don't remember the exact details, but it was one of those dreams where it is nothing but challenges and difficulties, though at least it was one where in the end I was able to overcome. It was something about my mother being around, inappropriately, naggingly, insatiably, and I vanquished her because she was some small (about the size of a volleyball), fuzzy, white thing filled with air, somewhat sheeplike but definitely inanimate--I punctured it with a pin and squished the air out of it. But in the dream I couldn't figure out what to do with the deflated remnant, and so I was walking around with everyone else, carrying it around, and no one else had any ideas what to do with it and weren't willing to give it any thought, either.

So there I am. In real life I don't know what to do with the deflated remnants of my mother that I carry around, either.