Ask Rachel

Dear Rachel,

I feel like a horrible daughter because I don’t want to talk to my mother on the phone. She’s incapable of talking for less than an hour, and she actually states her desire to talk for three hours. I don’t have that much time or patience. So I end up going six, eight months at a stretch without answering. Am I under some obligation to talk more often than that? Or is my own self-preservation worthy of sending her to voice-mail?

– Do Not Disturb

Dear Inbox Full,

What obligation? I mean, she brought you into this world. And then you paid her back by doing chores for 18 years. It’s a clean slate after that point. They say you can pick your friends (and your nose), but you can’t pick your family. I call baloney. If you want to die having never spoken to your madre again, that’s your prerogative.

– Choose wisely, my friend, Rachel

Dear Rachel,

Everyone I know outside of Colorado thinks that I must live within walking distance of Den-

ver. My friends visiting the capitol city will write me that we should get together. My own sister even called me on a long layover at DIA to see if I wanted to get lunch. How do people not understand that Colorado is bigger than New Hampshire? I think we need some PSA work here.

– Hop, Skip and a Seven-Hour Drive

Dear Over Yonder,

You think that’s bad? My amigos who grew up in New Mexico still get people thinking that they’re not citizens of the Union. Still, I get annoyed by the same phenomenon. I heard future President Hickenlooper once describe Colorado like this: if you took a magic piece of silk and covered all of Colorado’s surface area with it, every creek bed and mountain peak, and then unfurled it, it would be larger than Texas. That totally-not-high illustration should give Schoolhouse Rock some material.

– I drive it in six, Rachel

Dear Rachel,

I have never seen a moose. And I’m not some shut-in or city slicker who wouldn’t know a moose if it scooped me in its antlers and called me Squirrel. I go backpacking in the high country, and traveling all around the Rocky Mountains. I was OK with my distinct lack, until a coworker who moved here three months ago saw his first moose last weekend. I’m starting to take it personally. Am I repellent to moose? What the what?

– Bullwinkled

Dear Mooseless,

Take heart, I too have never seen a moose outside of a beer bottle label. Unlike you, though, I’m OK with that. Even though they’re not carnivorous, they’re like the Godzillas of the wild. They’re three stories tall, and they’d crunch you like a Moosehead can without even realizing you’re there. I’d rather spend three hours on the phone with a mother, any mother, than encounter wild moose (meese?)

– Moo, Rachel