Email from Barby

From: Barbara Pool
Sent:Mon 11/19/07 11:11 PM
To: Leesie (valkyrie@alumni.rice.edu)

Little B2Shoes,
send me the stuff I need to get for your dips so I can get them hopefully tomorrow or wednesday.
LA(ww)M


Emails from my mom are always a bit perplexing. Despite the fact that she is an erudite librarian who has been proofing my papers for two decades, she prefers to type emails in a telegram style frequently leaving out punctuation and pronouns. She happens to be asking me for a salsa recipe, but as you can see, she eschews the ethnic Spanish for "dip."

What I'd like to point out, however, is the salutation and closing. If you're confused that the email is addressed to "Little B2shoes," knowing that stands for Little Bouef-y Two Shoes probably doesn't help either. I, in fact, have no idea what this means, but she's been calling me this ever since I can remember. I guess it's a conflation of "goody two shoes" and the French word for cow, which may or may not be a term of endearment in France. Who knows. The B can alternately stand for "bitchy two shoes" which is used with almost the same frequency.

LA(ww)M stands for "love always, without wax, Mommy." This is also weird, but easier to explain. The word "sincerely" derives from the Latin "without wax" which refers to the practice of patching up botched marble sculptures with wax. If a sculptor fucked up someones nose, he would fill in the mistake, but a master's sculpture, in contrast, would be free of revisions or wax, thusly a "sincere" work. Anyway, I learned that in fourth grade and my mom has been signing notes like that ever since. I imagine that she was hoping I'd follow in her footsteps and take Latin and watch "I, Claudius" marathons with her, but much to her disappointment I studied Greek and our Classical impasse sustains itself to this day.

Lastly, I'd like to point out something that I think sums up my mother's character pretty succinctly. My mom spells her name "Barby," but half of her college friends mistakenly spell it "Barbie." Every Christmas there is a crisis because my mom tries to remember who spells it which way when she's signing her Christmas cards because she feels it would be rude to correct that person and feels obligated to sign "Barbie" lest they feel embarrassed. 40 years later. No, really.