CousinAnnelovesDownton

Mom tells me she found Howard’s End the series on PBS the evening before. It was good. She liked it. “But I fell asleep.”

OK, so here’s a series we could potentially watch together. It’s time to give her my PBS Passport login and password. I change my password from “CousinAnnelovesDownton” to something Henry VIII-esque in honor of Wolf Hall the series, and also because, in spite of how much I want to “be myself” around my family I don’t fancy hearing it from one person after another, “Why do you use Cousin Anne as your password?”

“You use Cousin Anne as your password?” Mom would say.

Then Lynne: “Mom says you use Cousin Anne as your password.”

And then it gets to Anne: “I heard you use my name as your password.”

Cousin Anne would be the last person among any of these people to mind. “No, I don’t mind at all. It’s actually quite flattering,” she would say.

But then there would be the background conversation: “Anne doesn’t even like Downton Abbey,” Lynne would say.

And Mom: “Is there anyone else in our family whose name you use as a password?”

Please, enough, it was just that one time!

I think of a passage I stumbled upon in Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow by Jerome K. Jerome:

There are certain misfortunes which, while inflicting a vast amount of suffering upon their victims, gain for them no sympathy. Losing an umbrella, falling in love, toothaches, black eyes, and having your hat sat upon, may be mentioned as a few examples, but the chief of them all is shyness. The shy man is regarded as an animate joke. His tortures are the sport of the drawing-room arena, and are pointed out and discussed with much gusto.

“Look,” cry his tittering audience to each other, “he’s blushing!”

“Just watch his legs,” says one.

“Do you notice how he is sitting?” adds another; “right on the edge of the chair.”

“Seems to have plenty of color,” sneers a military-looking gentleman.

“Pity he’s got so many hands,” murmurs an elderly lady, with her own calmly folded on her lap. “They quite confuse him.”

“A yard or two off his feet wouldn’t be a disadvantage,” chimes in the comic man, “especially as he seems so anxious to hide them.”

Would the password choices of anyone else in my family ever be up for discussion?