I Turned 51 and All I Got Was This DVD From Amazon, or How I Managed to Screw Up My Mom's Birthday, Albeit Less Than The Time I Forgot Her Birthday

My mom, as one of my friends who listens to too much rap music would put it, is what you would call a "cool ass female." She plays the unfortunate role of dealing with a family that acts like this, and she does it with a smile on her face (the obvious exception being holidays, where she insists on crying). This is a woman who allowed me to grow out a mullet my senior year of high school, let me take a spring break in Chicago so I could go to Wrestlemania and Jerry Springer, and only seems to be disappointed in me when I send my brother Johnny cool shirts from Good Will that wouldn't fit me (she thinks he's never going to grow up. Sorry Mom, I think you're thinking of Peter Pan). At this point, you might be saying "she kind of sounds like an enabler" to which I say two things:

1. Dude, that's my mom you're talking about. Watch your mouth
2. Enablers deserve great birthday presents

Because of this, I set out from my house in Tucson in search of a gift that would make her say "Ooh!" and "Aah!" and if I was lucky, for the first time in my life, "I love you" (kidding! She said it to me once but she thought I was Johnny). I quickly realized, however, that I had no clue what physical, tangible gift my mom might like.

This isn't to say that I couldn't have picked out a gift certificate to some place or bought her concert tickets or got her something functional - I could have. But where is the originality in getting your mom an iPhone cover? I needed a gift that said "you will remember this, even if you get Alzheimer's." Besides, there is no material gift that I could give her that wouldn't have both an impressive monetary value and also reprieve her of any kind of "gift receiver's remorse", where she wonders whether or not she could have found a higher rated model in some Consumer Reports magazine she got at Kroger or article she clicked on on AOL. We are dealing with a woman who spent 2 months trying to decide which digital camera she wanted to get, only to be faced with a whole new slew of seasonal models to choose from when she finally thought she had made up her mind. Listen, Annie Leibovitz, you're dealing with point and shoots here...they're all the same.

So I'm racked with the pressure to come through on a gift that my mom will remember forever - something so good that it will replace some of the bad ones, like the time I got mad at my older sister and carved KATY into my mom's new dresser with a straight pin. My mom came home and she was devastated. I stuck by my story that Katy did it. She was 21, I was 11. Guess whose story my mom believed? Ageism at it's finest I tell you.

Those were the bottom of the barrel memories I needed to replace - I won't even mention some of the bad ones - so this present had to be rocking. Needing a moment of inspiration, I decided to ask my other three siblings what they were getting my mom for her birthday. The conversations went something like this (summarized):

• Johnny - "I've been too busy studying all week to get anything. School's actually hard when you're pre-med like I am and not some fruity English major or whatever you are" DOUBT IT.
• Katy - "I've been too busy taking care of Ashley and working to get her anything. Besides, I have a full time job. Get her something for all of us." Heard that one before
• Ashley - "I just had surgery to remove a tumor from the base of my spine." I'm not one to point fingers, but isn't it awfully convenient that you decided to get the surgery done BEFORE mom's birthday? I'm just saying.

At this point not only did I not have a gift of a sibling to piggyback and draw ideas off of, I also had the added pressure of getting a gift to signify my entire family's love. Well, shit.

First thing was first, and I went to search for the one thing I knew my mom couldn't resist - George Strait. There's something about that man - be it the cowboy hat, the tight jeans, or the ability to produce over 50 different number one country hits - that drives my mom crazy. She calls him George, or, when she really wants to bring our family shame in a public setting where other people might overhear, Georgie. She makes it a point to see him in concert every time he comes to Indianapolis. I'm 99% sure she would leave my dad for him, which would be terribly ironic for Bill because he would inevitably become the main character in so many of George Strait's songs. DOUBLE WHAMMY!

To my most certain misfortune, there was nothing worth anything of his to be found on eBay or anywhere else that could deliver it in time. I did manage to send her a copy of his 1992 classic movie Pure Country, where his only stage directions seemed to be "grow out a beard and just keep on being yourself." Throw on a nice little note, and we at least have a stopgap should all else fail. Pure Country? They should call that movie Pure Entertainment. At least I knew I had the ability to keep her satisfied for two hours (...screw it, I know this is about my mom, but THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID). With this taken care of, I set off to add some pizazz to her birthday.

Had my mom been born on October 19th instead of November 19th, I would have been presented with a number of different options to choose from when it came to her present. Then Ashley's tumor decided to exist. This eliminated two things I had in my back pocket saved for a time like this - an Edible Arrangement and a Skype voicemail.

For those of you who don't know what an Edible Arrangement is, you obviously don't watch enough of the Food Network during the day, which causes me to wonder what the purpose of your life even is? Seriously, spend a couple hours every now and then watching Giada de Laurentiis overpronounce every Italian ingredient she uses just to prove that she should have an Italian cooking show. Watch Rachel Ray (on mute obviously) prepare a meal in 20 minutes that will take you at least an hour and a half. Watch Paula Deen come up with recipes that encourage all of the young mothers in the country to turn their children into Type 2 diabetics. And then, during the commercial, check out the ads for Edible Arrangements. They start off making you think that they're just your everyday run of the mill flowers, but then you start to say "hey, those look like strawberries" and that quickly forms into "HOLY SHIT THEY'RE DIPPED IN CHOCOLATE." As soon as I'd finished that commercial, it was on. One day I was going to get an Edible Arrangement for someone, and they were going to go crazy for it.

The initial plan involved me being present when the arrangement arrived, so after the recipient marveled over the incredible bouquet of calories, I could tear into it myself, devaluing the gift and using the excuse that "I needed more fruit in my diet." Then Ashley's tumor happened.

A funny thing about having a large incision made in your torso for the doctors to lift out your internal organs and get to your tailbone (besides being able to answer "yes, look at this picture" and "well, actually, it IS a tumor" to the Nickelodeon GUTS theme song and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop, respectively) - is that you are in incredible pain and the morphine makes you feel depressed. Needing to send my sister a little pick me, I cashed in the Edible Arrangements idea, attached balloons wishing her a Happy Sweet 16th, A Happy Hannukah, and to Get Well Soon. Fast, fast, slow, kind of like a waltz (note: I have no idea if a waltz is actually fast, fast, slow, but I'm not going to be bothered to look it up to find out).

Pictured: Opportunity RUINED

Because of this, I could no longer send my mom an Edible Arrangement, because sending two in such a short amount of time put me dangerously close to becoming "the guy who sends Edible Arrangements" and I'm not one to be pigeonholed, unless said pigeonhole is "the guy who wears horse shirts." I'm cool with that.

The other idea I had was to set up a Skype voicemail for my mom, much like the one we have set up for people to call and leave drunk dials to Club Trillion. So I'm cruising along thinking it would be a great idea and GODDAMMIT ASHLEY WHY DID YOU HAVE TO GET A TUMOR?

(A quick aside: why is dammit spelled like that and not damnit? It doesn't make sense. You are saying damn and it, the word should be damnit, dammit. This might have been the only thing I learned my senior year of high school, and that was only because I was super into The Catcher in the Rye and Holden Caulfield says it roughly 1900 times in the book. Still, you know you agree with me on this subject)

In the haste of trying to say "get well soon" while maintaining my emo stance against "greeting card corporations and their manufactured notions that everything can be made better with a simple card", I decided to set up a Skype voicemail for people to call Ashley and wish her well. This idea could have been easily done for my mom's birthday as well. I might not have a super wide influence, but my knowledge of all relevant Club Trillion passwords and my ability to sound like Mark in 140 character bursts would have allowed me to set up a Twitter notice to call that at least 10 people would have complied with. But I had used it already for Ashley, and being pigeonholed as "the guy who sets up Skype voicemails" is only a slightly less creepy pigeonhole than "the guy who is always eating yogurt"

So my top two ideas were out the window. Now, I'm not devoid of great ideas by any means, as you've read in the past I've come up with everything from the the formula for FOIL to the formula for Wayne Blasters. Ideas were not the difficult part. Working against me, though, were time and location. What could I string together on a day's notice and what could I have set up and paid for all from my location in Tucson? This is where things got difficult. I had a few ideas that I thought could work, but, as I was soon to find out, wouldn't.

The first idea was to have a barbershop quartet or singing telegram come by and serenade her with a little happy birthday action. Who doesn't dream of having four random strangers or one random Elvis impersonator coming to their door to serenade them? Okay, nobody dreams that. Nobody normal at least. But who wouldn't MIND if four random strangers or one random Elvis impersonator came to their door to serenade them? That's what I thought. There stood to be three problems with this:

1. It turns out that Hughie Mizell does not like to sing (Brownsburg, IN reference. Don't worry if you don't understand it)
2. The people who do this for a living are probably incredibly weird. Would I trust them to sing to my mom if she was going to be home by herself? And
3. How would I know she was home?

Shoot. I couldn't necessarily ask her in any kind of logical way what her plans on her birthday day were, because that would either serve to make her think that I had something incredibly grand planned, thus raising the level of whatever was going to happen to a possibly unattainable pre-birthday idea of what was to come. Or, it would make her think that I wanted to know when she was going to be out of the house so my sketchy friends from back home could rob us using the garage door code I gave them. So no dice on the quartet. And it would have been great too.

A couple other ideas I had that quickly were deemed impossible were having an airplane flying overhead carrying a banner wishing her a happy birthday, and, after surprisingly long negotiations, having John Cusack hold a boom box outside her window blasting happy birthday. The plane just wasn't cost effective, and I couldn't guarantee John Cusack wouldn't start playing "In Your Eyes." It wasn't a risk I was willing to take.

That left me with one final option. My mother is an irrational hater of many things. She calls them "skanky", "gross", or says "I can't stand _". I would list what some are but they totally put her into old lady Get Off My Lawn territory, and she would emphatically deny them, so I'll spare her since it's her birthday. Consider that gift number two. Anyway, one thing I can say my mom irrationally hates are these large signs that get placed in the front of our neighborhood in Indiana. They are, in my estimate, upwards of 10 feet tall and their lettering is similar to the rearrangeable ones that fast food places like McDonalds or small churches have that you desperately want to reword to make funny phrases and dirty words. Usually the signs are congratulating a group of graduates from our neighborhood, or someone that just had a baby, but one other thing the signs display are birthdays.

Since irritating my mom is half the fun of being her son (the other half is getting money from her), it seemed like a perfect plan to have one of those signs put up featuring an especially embarrassing message. Instead of "Lordy, Lordy, Look Who's 40!" I could replace it with "Lordy, Lordy, Look Who's 51!" Or maybe even straighter to the point with "Dear Mom aka Becky Keller, 51 is old. Like, really old. Love, Katy, Andy, Johnny and Ashley." The more mortified of a ten foot sign in one of the busiest intersections of town that she had no choice but to pass, the better.

So I set out to google and find the place in Brownsburg that does said signs. THE PHONE WAS OFF THE HOOK. Read that again, this time emphasizing it in the way K-Smoove said MY LOGIN INFORMATION DID NOT WORK.

THE PHONE WAS OFF THE HOOK

To borrow from another one of my literary friends, Gus Trotter, what am I F'ing supposed to do now? If this were a horror movie and I was a woman/black person, I would have started mumbling "No...NO!" in an ever-increasing volume. But since I'm resilient, I sat down here and started writing. My dream of getting the embarrassing sign was crushed, but my ability to embarrass and, at the same time, enliven my mom through written word had not been altered.

So enjoy this, mom. Sorry that we didn't get you anything good for your birthday. It's my bad. I told Katy, Johnny and Ashley I'd take care of it and all you came away with was a copy of Pure Country and a long-ass blog. Since this is the second time in a row my gift to you has been writing, I'm starting to get worried that I'm being pigeon-holed as "the guy who writes all his blogs about his mom" and "the guys who writes his mom blogs instead of getting her presents." These are really best fit for Buster Bluth, so don't worry, you won't be getting another blog for Christmas. Mostly because I already wrote that one.

We all love you. Happy birthday.

Andy...Katy, Johnny, and Ashley