Digital adverts drive me mad.
The flawless way digital marketing works has finally convinced my mother that she is psychic. She has long suspected that she can make contact with the other side, but after the incident I am about to tell you about, nobody will ever be able to shake that belief of hers.
In a nutshell, for those who don't know: if you search for something on Google, or go into an online shop and don't finish your purchase, the platform will do everything in its power to sell you the thing you were looking for. It's happened to all of us. We look something up online, and for weeks afterwards we are flooded with ads for that very same thing on every possible channel – Facebook, YouTube and so on. It isn't a coincidence, it's a digital marketing technique. It's called remarketing.
And the ideal “victim” of this remarketing is my mother, who sees divine providence in everything. My mother is a spiritual being.
For as long as I can remember, she has steered clear of conventional medicine and treated us with alternative methods. Mostly garlic, followed by massages with pork lard, turmeric and vinegar.
As the years go by, the occult streak in her grows stronger, and now, besides garlic, lard and so on, she treats us with a far more powerful remedy – her own aura, combined with her mighty healing energy. Lately, whenever she sees me, she makes the sign of the cross over me with a solemn “Be colourful and shared” – an incantation she learnt from her bedside book, the much-hyped bestseller “The Lord's Housekeeper”.
That is, she only greets me like that when my husband Emo isn't around. Once, when she blessed me like that in his presence, he protested against his mother-in-law's wish for his wife to be “shared”.
And over the past year, maybe because of the pandemic, my mother's mystical powers have reached alarming proportions.
Her suspicion that the spirits use her powerful energy as a conduit between them and us – ordinary people – is nothing new.
When she loses her glasses, for example – something that happens all the time – she wanders listlessly around the kitchen looking for them in all the logical places where a pair of glasses might hide: in the oven, in the microwave, in the fridge, everywhere. Her efforts are often doomed to failure. She sits down, resigned to the conclusion that, and I quote, “it's as if some spirit has hidden them from her on purpose”. This calms her down. After all, it is impossible for a mere mortal (even one with her abilities) to find something hidden by those disembodied tricksters. And she knows from experience that after about 15 minutes the spirits, old acquaintances of hers, will crack in the face of her Capricorn patience and give her glasses back. They usually leave them in plain sight on the kitchen table, right in front of her. As if they were mocking her for being so absent-minded.
My mother makes good use of these 15 minutes of waiting for her glasses by patiently tapping away at her phone. Meanwhile, she never misses a chance to tell off her grandchildren, whom I've brought over to visit, for overdoing it with THEIR phones. The kids ask her why she keeps fiddling with her phone if phones are so harmful. The explanation is that an acquaintance of hers, Auntie Michka, has passed away, and my mother is trying to find on Google the contact details of a funeral agency she knows, so she can give them to the late woman's family. While she's doing this, she never misses a chance to slip in to her grandchildren that, unlike them, she had a wonderful, happy childhood.
“Not like you two – hunched and twisted over your phones,” she concludes, squinting in concentration at the screen of her own phone.
Next come the obligatory memories of the People's Republic, which we have heard a thousand times and know by heart. We also know that under no circumstances must they be interrupted. We listen patiently to the story of my mother's wonderful childhood, when the Hadzhi Dimitar neighbourhood rang until late at night with the happy shouts of children playing dodgeball and kar. Children who had a big, real tomato with white cheese for lunch, a tomato that didn't taste of plastic. Children who drank tangy boza with tulumbichki at the sweet shop for 6 stotinki. As she drifts off into her happy memories, she puts her phone down and starts absent-mindedly fiddling with some object on the table in front of her. As she turns it over in her hands, she glances at it and discovers that it is the long-sought glasses. Neither she, nor I, nor the kids are surprised. This is not the first time this exact scenario has played out.
We send the kids into the other room to play with their grandpa. Relieved that we won't be setting a bad example to anyone, the two of us grab our phones again. My mother puts her glasses on and goes on Facebook to read up on the latest scientific discoveries about a strong immune system, and sends me an article on how good garlic water is for our immunity. I bury myself in Instagram.
Five minutes later my mother lifts her head from her phone. Her glasses glint under the kitchen lamp.
- “Your Auntie Miche has just appeared to me and passed on a message from the other side! Her last wish is to be buried by the Black Rose funeral agency.” My mother's voice is solemn.
- “How did she appear to you? How did she pass on the message?”
- “Strange,” my mother says, more to herself than to me, “why would Miche choose to appear to me and not to her own daughter……”
- “Mum, how did Auntie Miche appear to you?”
- “…..I wonder if she and Lile had had a falling-out just before she passed….” (Lile is my mother's best friend and Auntie Miche's daughter.)
- “Mum!” I drag her out of her reverie.
- “Oh, child… Miche appeared to me through my phone, how else?”
- “Through your phone how, exactly?”
- “While I was reading an article on Facebook about the benefits of turmeric. Out of nowhere a big picture popped up of a woman with her eyes humbly lowered, dressed in mourning – in a black headscarf. She was looking down, so I couldn't see her face. But I'm sure it was Auntie Miche! I recognised her by the rose in her hands. Ah, how Miche loved those roses….. And underneath her picture there was the address and phone number of the Black Rose funeral agency.”
My mother phones Lile to tell her about the late woman's last wish. Lile, shaken, informs my mother that “Black Rose” was also the name of Auntie Miche's all-time favourite TV series when she was alive. After which she hurries to hang up so she can book the services of the agency in question.
Hats off to whoever runs Black Rose's campaigns. And my mother, her status as a psychic now set in concrete, carries on doing good. She has now taken on the impossible task of getting my father to quit smoking. She intends to use the power of hypnosis for the purpose.
