Foobonia and Points West.

There is, of course, another interesting thing about the cedar chest that Elly can't quite consider because she's kind of short-sighted. To explain that thing, let's explain another thing that's going to happen: Elly and Phil getting territorial about all of the crap their folks unload when they downsize. Much noise is made about the old pump organ both of them want for their own reasons. As I've said before, Elly needs to get the damned thing even if she has no intention of ever playing it because she wants to prove once and for all that Phil should apologize for being born male and thus hijacking her childhood and making her a slave in her own home while he got to be free and happy and never have to deal with half the shit she did. Phil wants the damned thing because he'll use it and he's all kinds of sick of Elly rewriting history to make herself the victim of all victims surpassing all others when everyone else saw a reasonably happy girl having a reasonably easy life. Jim is sick of his two idiot children never getting along because they want to fight childhood battles until they're in their eighties so he gives the damned thing to the church to stop the damned fighting because he thinks if he takes the symbol away, the fight will go with it.

Since Elly is as dumb as a sack of hair, it's quite likely that she doesn't understand that the same blasted thing might have been going on with that cedar chest Thelma gave her. What could easily have happened is that Thelma reflected on what her nieces and nephews were up to and thought to herself "Gee willy-wonkers!! Dora and Wesley are fit to murder one another over that old chest of mine! Maybe if I hand it off to that dozy idiot woman who I used to live next to because I feel sorry for her and her family, they'll settle the heck down!!"

The reason that she might have been seen as a useful neutral party that Thelma almost pitied would never actually occur to the poor, dim-brained creature is, of course, the fact that Elly is also exceedingly vain on top of being as dumb as dirt and almost genetically incapable of seeing all the good things in her life. To be given a sort of sympathy prize from someone who wants other people to focus on what matters is not something that can occur to her while being thought of as being central to this woman's existence is.

One of the more irritating habits Lynn had is that she couldn't quite allow herself to let characters she didn't see as having much in common with one another interact. The same woman who can't include characters who don't talk to her doesn't seem to be present when they talk to one another; this is sort of a let-down because it's obvious that she missed out on a nifty.

This is because it's clear as anything that Marian Richards and Thelma Baird would have taken an instant dislike to one another. Next door to Elly is a professional dog breeder who saw pets as a positive thing that enriched lives and who didn't see the point of Elly's regime of endless screaming and never allowing herself to be pleased by anything. Back 'home' on the West Coast is a bitter lunatic who hates dogs because of her own lousy childhood, kept Elly from winning arguments to make her a nice child and who thinks that if a child is allowed to know that what she does pleases her mother, said child will simply sit down and die in a puddle of her own filth because an idiot English Canadian like Marian is hard-wired to imagine a child thinking 'My mommy loves me so I don't have to exert myself or grow or get better; I can now just vegetate because I'm loved'.

The irritating thing is not just that Marian would clearly have thought she won the inevitable argument about her lousy methods and how they made Elly the paranoid bug-fuck crazy rage goblin she is today because fate denied Thelma a child. The irritating thing is not that Marian never regretted a single hurtful word or shrugged off her child's heartache. The irritating thing is, as always, that Marian is too damned stupid to understand that Elly isn't a normal person. She died never understanding that Elly took her to mean only what she said she meant and went to her death not accepting the anecdotal evidence of husbands, sons, sons-in-law, relatives and others who didn't know what they were talking about that suggested that Elly saw herself as a despised and regretted disappointment who couldn't make her mother happy, Elly God-damned knew that she was loved and respected and no one had to tell her that.

Ah, well. Since this strip allows for a sort of bullshit afterlife with ghost dogs hanging around trees so they can play with their abusers and dead women sewing Miracle Dresses, we can imagine that instead of Masky McDeath ushering her into the void, Thelma would be there to show Marian the truth. Since, as the Japanese say, only death can cure a fool, only death could make Marian see the damage she did loving Elly in a way she couldn't understand and that made her feel like a garbage person. This is why I think that instead of Marian's ghost helping out with the dress, that's Thelma subbing for someone who avoids her family out of shame.

Of course, there is one exception to the otherwise ironclad rule against not maintaining perfect fidelity to one's assigned Longed-For One: the otherwise Once In A Lifetime True Love has to be dead for at least ten years and you have to be over sixty so there's no chance of the step-child problem. This is why the only thing Elly stressed about with Mrs Baird and her dad was the stress love puts on the human heart. In both cases, elderly people were allowed to be together for their last few years because, well, it beat her long-feared dread of dying single all hollow.

The interesting thing about this is at that some point, someone usually makes a rather maudlin and mawkish remark about how after seven decades of fidelity, he or she is suddenly the proud owner of a complicated love life. This, I should think, is owing to a sort of belief in an afterlife that's a shadowy approximation of the living world. In this Foob Valhalla, we're supposed to look forward to an eternity of Marian grousing at Jim for 'cheating' on her just because she was dead longer. Perhaps he, Mrs Baird and Les Moore can go off to Afterlife Montoni's one day and talk about their troubles over ghostly gazpacho pizza. After all, St Dead Lisa is also sort of angry at him for remarrying and would tend to be a jerk about it.

As we all sort of know by now, Lynn has always had a problem with older women telling her what to do. No matter who that older lady might be, Lynn seems to actively resent having to deal with or obey someone who isn't a big, strong man who she can respect. What this means is that the point of the arc we just watched seems to be to remind us that Elly never really seems to have especially liked Thelma much.

This is because she has done certain things that a snippy, defensive, sullen and just plain angry basket-case like Elly would see as war crimes:

1. The first big arc with Thelma ended up with her conning Elly into taking in a puppy she didn't want because she knew she'd get stuck with it because she liked children who needed to learn to obey their mother more than Elly.
2. Thelma used to waste Elly's valuable time about boring people she never met, boring places she can't visually imagine and boring events that mean nothing to her.
3. Since Thelma is childless and thus possessed with the wicked urge to overstep her authority, she used to override Elly's parenting decisions and spoil dinners for children who had to learn to eat only what Elly cooked when Elly cooked it.
4. Thelma has annoying interests that repel Elly and the overweening need to force Elly to partake in them.
5. When she explains this to people, they all defend Thelma and call Elly a prickly annoyance who's still an irritant and spoiled brat.

This is why the last time we see Thelma, Elly takes Lizzie with her so that at least someone going to the old folk's home will be happy to see the old meat-axe. The interesting thing is that since she isn't actually family, a form of stupid magic takes place when Thelma passes away. Suddenly, a live irritant will magically become a dead mentor Elly always loved.

As I said the other day, it seems to me that it took Michael a few years to catch up to everyone else and become a member of the Middle Years cast. We have three years to go for him to stop looking like Evil Linus and start looking like a smaller version of The Delicate Genius. You might say that Michael is in conflict with the premise that's being established. While everyone else is trying to head into a wider world, the grandiose little nitwit is trying very hard to keep the strip the way it is because change means that he's not really the measure of all things. We have to wait for the dolt to attend eighth grade before he's really a part of the cast again.

That being said, we at least don't have to watch Lynn to do to him what she did to the other hold-over from the Early Years: Mrs Baird. In about six months time, we're going to watch the kids get all weepy about how life is always changing and thus getting ruined forever because Thelma simply can't live in her house any longer. While it did set up something Mike liked by having Lawrence back so he could pretend life wasn't going to change substantively, it also set things up for the first death we saw in the strip. In about two years or so, the poor thing will pass quietly in her sleep and we'll be watching Elly wonder where people's priorities are.

It turns out that people's priorities are in trying to will themselves to forget that people die; this is because she goes through the same thing with her mother and doesn't seem to have learned much from having to bury Mrs Baird. The legacy she leaves behind is the need to connect the pets to Farley the shambling and brain-damaged abuse victim pet of delight.

The odd thing about the middle years is having to deal with one of the odder side effects of the stupid, soap operatic revenge fantasy in which Ted takes it between the uprights so as to serve as a stand-in for all the stinkaloos who ever stood Lynn up in her life; said side effect is the imbecilic nonsense that required Connie to play what we might call musical houses for a while.

We're going to see the process in motion all over again next January when Mrs Baird interrupts Elly lecturing Phil about how smoking is for clods and savages to announce that she's getting too old to rattle around her big old empty house and wants to move into the senior citizens complex. This, for some irritating reason, traumatizes Lizzie and Mike into trying to sabotage the process because unlike regular children who'd shrug when told this and ask when dinner is, they want her to live in her old house forever and ever.

This coincides neatly with Connie's oafish control freak husband throwing her under the bus by getting a transfer to Milboring so he can step on a relationship that scares him all to death, the poor baby. As Elly blinds herself to the fact that she's just flushed Annie down the commode, she makes the amazingly surprising and not at all ploddingly inevitable suggestion that Connie can move to the Baird place so they can drink coffee and snipe about ungrateful children forever and always.

This not only allows Elly to have her real best friend around so they can compare notes on how horrible children are, it also sets things up so that we can have her drop in on Mrs Baird every so often. This might have been something of a fixture save for the fact that Lynn didn't have the real Thelma in her life any longer so one fine day, John asked what amusing adventure she'd embarked upon only to be told "dying in her sleep of a massive stroke." More on that and what we can take away from her life tomorrow.