An unsatisfactory visit, part 1

Sometimes it seems like a topic shows up on my radar and then just won't let go. I think the technical term is synchronicity. The way I understand the theory of synchronicity, I should pay attention when it happens. I don't recall whether the theory says what to do in case I don't want to pay attention.

Not Mother's house or pool, but you get the idea.

A couple of weekends ago, I drove to Big City to visit Mother. The most immediate motivation was purely sybaritic: it has been very hot lately, and Mother has a swimming pool. And in the end I got to use it a couple of times, in the mornings before Mother got up. Not that she would have stopped me using it any other time, but we were talking.

So much talking

These days, when I visit with Mother we spend a lot of time talking. Back when Father was still alive, that was less true.

I'm sure I've discussed this in an earlier post, but I just spent over an hour looking for it and I can't find it. The indexing that I have set up for this blog isn't nearly good enough. Anyway, the point I wanted to reference is that as long as Father was alive, Mother never seemed to talk very much. Father always dominated the conversations, whether in public or among friends or just at home among family. Always. On the other hand, once he was dead I noticed a major change in Mother whenever I visited her ... at any rate, if it was just the two of us. Suddenly she talked a lot. Sure, some of it was practical. But a lot of it was just talk. I finally asked her about what was responsible for the difference. She said, more or less, that when Father was alive she let him dominate the conversations because she knew it mattered to him. No other reason. (At a certain topological level, her reasons maybe aren't that different from what Marie told me here.) Anyway, now that he was gone and there was no longer any reason to worry about his preferences, she was reverting to "normal." The result is that when I visit over a weekend, I often drive there on Saturday; then we spend all of Sunday morning talking, and much of the rest of Sunday too. Finally we wrap it up Monday so I can go home and she can go to work. Of course, this weekend Monday was Labor Day, which gave us an extra day.

Anyway, we spent a lot of time talking. But this time, honestly, the talking was very unsatis­factory. I kept feeling like I said something to piss her off. I kept feeling like she was mad at me. 

An example

At this point it has been a week and a half, and I didn't take notes at the time, so I can't remember all of the discussions. But for example, she asked me how it was possible for anybody (meaning the people she sees on the news) to distrust vaccines?

I tried to explain that the world has changed since she was a girl. I said nobody distrusts the polio vaccine or the smallpox vaccine. But now there are far more of them out there, and legally the manufacturers shielded from liability for vaccine injuries. This shielding creates an opportunity for moral hazard, the circumstance where the benefits of an action (profits from selling vaccines) flow in one direction (to the parmaceutical companies who make the vaccines) while the risks (in case of injury or death) flow in another direction (to the patients who cannot sue for compensation). And I suggested that some people think the pharmaceutical companies might be tempted to cut corners in their development or safety testing, since they can't be punished if something goes wrong. So it's natural for people who think that way to be distrustful. I tried to suggest that this was very different from simply being "anti-science."

She nodded along with my whole explanation, and then asked (almost belligerently) "What about the measles vaccine?"

I don't know. What about it? Was she asking me for a complete list of which vaccines are safe and which aren't? (I can't supply that.) Or was she accusing me of being "anti-science"? I don't know what she meant, and I didn't answer her very effectively.

And then she said ....

There was more. As I say, I've forgotten most of our topics. But mostly they were as unsatisfying as the discussion of vaccines.

And then in a side comment just by the way, Mother said she was worried about running out of money. This was unexpected. Between the time Father died and this conversation, Mother always gave the impression that she was in comfortable circumstances. In the moment she went on to talk about something else totally different. But the next morning after breakfast, I asked her about it.

[See Part 2.]