On a mother's advice, and the way things are
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- March 16, 2024
- 398
When you’ve been invited somewhere, Mom advised, always ring the doorbell with your elbow, meaning don’t arrive empty-handed.
She was well-known for similar aphorisms, among them:
—If there’s enough blue in the sky to make a farmer a pair of overalls, it won’t rain.
—Upper lights are gauche.
—College isn’t a job factory.
—And always vote for the best candidate, as long as it’s a Democrat.
My mother was one of those rare women who figured out a way to be a good mom even as she began a career outside the home, using her Master’s degree to become an associate professor in Business Administration, not exactly what an English major might have expected out of her life, but inspiring and illuminating nonetheless.
She was a tenacious advocate for the less fortunate, a voracious reader, a devout Roman Catholic, a fan of the Cleveland Indians and, it’ll come as no surprise, a staunch defender of her beliefs.
You’d be better off asking Niagara Falls to flow upward than to even attempt to move her off her position on any issue of the day.
Not that she courted confrontation; in fact, she was rather reluctant to engage in pointless badinage unless and until someone crossed the line between harmless stupidity into cruel and malignant ignorance. This particular trait is one that I’ve done my best to incorporate, not only in my writing, but in the way I live my life.
I may not have always met Mom’s high bar, but I’ve done my best, which is probably why people enjoy talking with me … not all of them, obviously, but enough to keep me out of serious fistfights.
The last time that I threw down – to use a term that used to be in vogue – I was in the eighth grade. The particulars of the argument have long since passed their expiration date but I remember that it occurred during a sandlot football game, which were always rather rough-and-tumble affairs, spiced with cheap shots and other less-than-sporting strategies, the kind that often involved kneecaps.
You have to understand that when we got together – after we had gotten our after-school fix of “Dark Shadows” – it was with the expressed assumption that there would be no adults to spoil things.
Grownup supervision ruined so many otherwise outrageously fun activities that it was anathema for us to even consider playing under the unblinking gaze of older folks, let alone our parents.
These were the days when kids pretty much ran free and if we got back home before dark, hardly any questions arose, but my sharp-eyed mother was always on the lookout for telltale traces of blood.
This is why I always wore several layers of shirts, just in case I had to make a last-minute change before I joined the family for supper.
Mom was convinced that we only played touch football, never tackle, an illusion I did very little to puncture, preferring a bit of prevarication to the unvarnished truth. It reminds me of that scene toward the end of “Apollo 13,” when Ed Harris asks a NASA engineer whether or not the astronauts should be cognizant of the looming re-entry situation, one that was life-and-death anyway.
“Is there anything we can do about it?” he asks. Getting a negative reply, he says, “Then they don’t need to know about it, do they?”
I’m not sure if comparing football to space exploration is legit, but that’s the way I’m writing it and I’ll just let history be the judge.
“Is that the best way to say it?” Mom sometimes asked after reading something I’d written for the high school newspaper.
“Too harsh?”
“Maybe,” she’d say, “not harsh enough. Shake your readers up.”
In years to come, time that my mother wasn’t granted, I’d see a lot of her in Frances McDormand’s portrayal of William Miller’s mom in “Almost Famous,” the 2000 film that follows her son as he travels the country with a rock band, hoping to make a name for himself as a writer. She’s worried about the kind of lifestyle he’s joining, if only on the periphery, and is a force of nature when it comes to protecting him on his journey into that wild world.
“Your mother left a message for you,” a hotel concierge tells William, shaking his head at the memory. “She freaked me out.”
“She means well,” says her son, knowing exactly what happened.
Earlier in the movie, prodded by her daughter – “He deserves to know the truth” – William’s mom finally confesses that instead of being 13 years old, he’s actually only 11. “There’s too much padding in the lower grades … so I skipped you a couple.”
“That,” says William, thinking about his delayed puberty and the ridicule he’s experienced from his peers, “explains so much.”
My mother, also a college professor, didn’t do that to me, probably because she understood that if I passed each year, it’d be a miracle.
But since I moved home in January, very few visitors have come around. Then I remembered, this house has no doorbell which, to quote William Miller, could explain so much.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to find him on Facebook, where life has a way of following familiar patterns