Momedy

In honor of Mother’s Day, I thought I’d share some of my favorite memories about my mom, who recently turned 80.

When I was in college, I had a semester in London and my family came to visit me. I met them at the airport and escorted them to their hotel via The Underground, the local subway system. Mom is a classy, proper woman, so I was regretting my choice of transportation when a man boarded the train with his basset hound, sat next to my mother, and put the dog over his shoulder like you’d hold a baby, because the dog started licking Mom’s ear and the side of her face like she was a snack. Knowing Mom was exhausted from jet lag and already on her last nerve, I wasn’t sure how she might convey her displeasure. Were we approaching international incident territory? But she didn’t react at all. Once we got off at our stop, she stood as straight as she could, brushed herself off and said “Well! Usually I only let your father do that.”

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I knew early on I wanted to be an architect, so I took mechanical drawing in high school. When Mom and Dad attended the open-house, my teacher casually mentioned to all the parents that some crazy how, two girls had signed up for his class but not to worry, he was sure they’d be flunking out soon and things would be back to normal. I wasn’t there to see for myself how Mom reacted, but others who were present used phrases like “she went up one side of him and down the other” and “total annihilation”. She had my back! And do I even need to say that the other girl and I got the two highest grades in the course?

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Several years ago, Mom and I took a two-day road trip together and spent a night in a hotel along the way. She was having some mobility issues due to Parkinson's, so I had specifically selected a hotel with a nice restaurant so we wouldn’t need to go anywhere else once we arrived. But Mom vetoed that. She had spotted a nearby BBQ joint on the drive into town, and we were in the south after all, so that’s where she wanted to go for dinner. When we sat down, we unfortunately discovered her chair had a puddle of water on it, and her pants were immediately soaked. The hostess who’d seated us was quite apologetic and several waiters sprang into action to get my mom a new chair and to dry her off as best as possible. When our waiter came back and took our orders he asked “And what would you like to drink” Mom replied “Water.” and then after a perfectly timed pause, “In a glass.” Not for nothing, the brisket we had there was maybe the best I’ve ever tasted.

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Mom has somehow managed to make the same mistake three times; openly speaking her mind before fully realizing who she was talking to:

• She was chatting with a doctor who was a good friend of my grandparents. Knowing Mom was a new mother, he asked her if she’d used Infants’ Tylenol and what she thought of it. She informed him she had tried it on me, and didn’t think much of it as it didn’t appear to help me at all if I had pain or a fever and she now used different, better medicine for me. That’s when she learned he was one of the developers of Infants’ Tylenol. I guess that one’s partially on me.

• Mom was talking to a distant relative she didn’t see very often, but knew worked at Rubbermaid. I’m paraphrasing “Oh, I’m glad to see you! I’ve used Rubbermaid bathmats for years and some dummy recently decided to stop making them with the holes so now the bottoms get mildew so easily. I’m hoping you can somehow let that group know what a big design mistake that was!” He, of course, was “the dummy”.

• Mom met someone at a party and he mentioned he was in publishing. This was back when the book Shogun had just come out. It was a quite lengthy book and therefore the first hardback to cost over $20. Since it was a huge best-seller and a hot topic that summer, it made perfect sense to Mom to bring it up as a topic of discussion with someone in publishing. She apparently made her opinion quite clear that $20 for a book was absurdly expensive, and “they” should be ashamed of themselves. Yes, he was with the publishing house for Shogun. My parents told me about this encounter the next morning and Mom was mortified, but in one of the classiest moves ever, that man drove to our house later that day and hand-delivered a complimentary copy of Shogun to Mom. So that one paid off, but you can start to see why I was worried about what she might say to the man on the subway with the basset hound.

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Finally, there’s no way a story about Mom could conclude without mentioning her thrifty nature, which can only be described as legendary. I once heard one of her friends say right to her face “When you open your wallet, moths fly out.”

She was the queen of couponing and was “recycling, reusing, repurposing” long before that was a thing. She reused paper grocery bags, returned fruit and vegetable containers to farmstands and pots to nurseries, and composted everything possible, including dryer lint, to the point my dad asked me to please make sure she didn’t compost him if he passed first.

Everything had a second life. The bags cereal comes in, within the box? She’d wash them out and reuse them instead of buying ziplock bags. VHS tapes came with two sets of label stickers and you only need one, so the extras were used to indicate what was in those cereal bags. The last half inch of a candle? She’d save enough to melt together to get a new candle. My Mom and grandmother both open gifts carefully to salvage as much of the paper as possible. You could see presents between them have the same paper for years, as long as the packages got progressively smaller. Mom would also salvage the ribbons from presents, sometimes ironing them to get any creases out. The year after my parents moved, I noticed my Christmas gifts had never been fancier, and were actually wrapped in cloth. Slowly it dawned on me. “Mom, are these your old curtains?” Yes they were.

Speaking of that move, my sister and I were tasked with helping empty out the old attic. We came across a paper bag filled with dirt. That was unexpected so we asked Mom about it and she explained “Remember a few years back when one of the flagstones on the terrace heaved up and people were tripping on it? Your father pried it up with a crowbar and removed dirt under it to make it level again. That’s the dirt, in case the flagstone ever settles back.” Nothing got thrown away that might come in handy again later.

I’m off to visit Mom on Sunday. Who knows what other memories will pop up or be made?