CONTINUED: Good News

And frankly,  the remnants of this division existed into my generation of children, born in the 1940s.  Working fathers and mothers,  barely able to afford much more than food on the table,  sacrificed money and time to build private schools in the name of their religious affiliation, whether Catholic or Protestant.  These were people who held their own faith sacred and mistrusted that of others.

Growing up in a Catholic household, I never heard a single negative or derogatory comment about any of the Protestant denominations, nor of Jews, for that matter.  Except, of course, they were wrong in their religious views.  To my parents, the Catholic Church was the only true church, and the only way to salvation, unless one was a really, really good “non-Catholic.”  God would make allowances when, for example, a Methodist or Presbyterian showed up at the Pearly Gates and fainted dead away upon discovering St. Peter was Catholic, as was the rest of heaven.  The old boy might even be wearing a Rosary around his neck.

We children were schooled daily in our religion at one of the thousands of Catholic Schools that were common landmarks in the eastern cities of the 1950’s.  Here in school also,  one would never hear scurrilous comments about other faiths, but it was somehow made quite apparent to us that Protestants were “not like us.” and in fact we were better, since our religion had more rules to follow and required attendance at church.  I might add that the Vatican hysterically tried to regulate sex.  How perfected could an adherent get, when he opened his mind and yearnings to the penetrating stare of the Church?  I have to wonder how many old Irish priests got to giggling when they considered that in training young Catholics to think themselves better than Protestants,  they were paying direct retribution to the damned Brits who lorded over the Old Sod for centuries, starving the Irish into submission and decimating their culture.  And in my town, it was payback to the generation of Teutonic Europeans who had arrived before the Irish and in the 1940’s and 1950’s  held positions of power and importance in the city.  It often amounted to simple reverse snobbery.

I remember one particular incident from my childhood that should serve to illustrate a subtle prejudice.  I call it, “Religion Matters, Even In A Snow Storm.”

As I trudged up Sunset Avenue carrying a canvas bag with “The Observer Dispatch” emblazoned on the side,   I never realized I was marching along in the  tradition of those orphan boys 100 years before who eked out a living selling newspapers.  I was not an orphan, but the Rev. Mrs. Gasek ... her husband the pastor of  Utica’s Grace Episcopal Church ... may have  thought so when I came to her door during a  blizzard on that wintry evening in 1955, to collect the bill for the week’s newspapers.   The storm would turn out to be one of the city’s worst of the decade.  Over 5 feet of snow fell in less than 24 hours.  Adults would worry and fret, but to me a heavy snow  was simply an event that required I lift my feet a little higher to get where I was going through the drifts.  At eleven years of age,  a big snow was just plain fun, especially when it closed the schools. I thought of myself as a boy of the north, a strapping Son of Utica, born in a blizzard so I was told.  But to be honest, this storm was indeed beginning to worry me as I aimed toward home.  There were no cars left on the roads, and it looked like folks had given up the frozen battle and were now  huddled around their stoves and radiators.  I was totally alone,  in the dark and in a blizzard.

The Gaseks were  the last customer on my newspaper route, and they lived  in a comfortable house on the corner of Sunset Ave. and Newell Street, just three blocks from my home.  As the wind rattled their window panes and snow piled up on the front porch, climbing its way  to the window bottoms, the pastor’s wife  answered the ringing door bell and opened her front door to  behold young Dave, swaddled in six layers of clothing (none matching) and probably missing one glove, as was often the case in those days.  "Forty cents, please,"  squeaked out from my midget apparition while the snow swirled past me and blasted against the poor woman,  poised before me and  resembling a windblown Donna Reed.

The Reverend was just arriving home, having had a harrowing drive up Genesee Street from his church.  I politely refused the woman’s offer to step inside.  After all, they were as Protestant as one (or two) could be, he being the minister of a downtown church, she being the hostess of no doubt over a thousand covered dish suppers.  She insisted her husband take me home in his car.  He looked a bit rattled but indicated he was game to head back out on the road.  I declined that offer also, not wanting to be dropped off in front of my home by a non-Catholic clergyman, even in the middle of a howling storm of biblical proportions.  Besides, how would I explain it to my parents?  I tried to withdraw from the porch, stepping backward into the eye of the storm.  Mrs. Gasek refused to let go of my arm, her feet firmly planted on the threshold as she stood shivering in the  doorway.  Today I chuckle as the  vision of a couple standing in the gaping maw of the storm comes to mind, she pleading with him not to go.   I could see the snow building up on her black woolen dress. 

“You can’t leave,” she shouted into the wind, though barely inches from my face.  “You’ll be lost in the storm!  We’ll find you in a snow bank tomorrow!  Frozen!” 

The Reverend Mr. Gasek, perhaps hearing a whisper from the Holy Spirit, was suddenly inspired to ask for my phone number.  He called my mother and asked her permission.  She was embarrassed, but assented, and I rode home in a wonderfully warm and commodious black Buick.  I was so comfortable when we arrived in front of my house,  it’s a wonder I wasn’t ready to forsake the faith of my fathers and turn Protestant immediately.

The only mention of the episode that evening was from my Dad.   "That was very nice of the Gaseks,” he said.  “But the next time it snows so hard, come right home." 

Yeah, sure, OK Dad.

I suppose it's unnecessary to say the Gaseks were terrifically nice people. I continued to bring the evening newspaper to their home until a year later when we moved to another part of the city and I gave up the West Utica route for another closer to our new flat on Brinckerhoff Ave.

I’d say one piece of Good News was that my generation of Catholics continued to meet and mix with a wider variety of people than those we grew up with.  Some were edifying, like the Reverend Gasek and his family.  Many of my fellow students and I  transitioned from Catholic schools to public colleges and became acquainted with the liberal arts and a larger world.  Many  married so-called non-Catholics and today all of us probably count among our friends people from a variety of religions.  And finally, from different races and cultures.

I live in a far more liberal world than my ancestors.  While I may be lighthearted in the re-telling of their stories, I don’t belittle them and their beliefs or  traditions, having not lived in their time or faced their unique problems.  But I get annoyed when I see people in recent generations close themselves off to anything different from their own understanding.  Worse are those who take a nation’s history of disappointments, wed it to religious fervor and harness the resulting violence, hatred and tears to a political and criminal agenda.  

The Good News, as I understand it, is supposed to free us. Only mankind can enslave us.

 

* See John O’Grady’s “Catholic Charities in the United States,” Chapter 7, 1930,  Ransdell, New York.  Also available on-line at  Google Books.

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David Griffin           copyright 2009

CONTINUED: Four Eyes Sandwich

Uncle Tip set up a radio on the hamper and plugged it in to an outlet his friend Tony had wired through the wall from the living room out to the porch. It was an old Zenith and it didn’t work well. Every few minutes Uncle Tip twisted around in his chair and pounded the top of the radio to restore reception or vent his anger with an umpire’s call of a strike that no one in the radio audience could see.

“How do you know it’s a bad call if you’re not there, Uncle Tip,” I said.

“That umpire hates the Yankees,” he said. “I know all these little secrets about major league ball,” he said. “You could learn a lot about baseball by listening to me. You could learn a lot from me about anything, Snot-nose.”

Now he was annoying me and I spoke up.

“Well I always wanted to know something.”

“Shoot,” he said.

“Suppose the bases are loaded and Mickey Mantle hits a ball so high no one is sure if it’ll ever come back down in the park

“That wouldn’t –“ he said. But I interrupted him.

“Well, it could,” I said. “The runners wouldn’t know if they should run. The ball could have disintegrated or maybe a high wind above the stadium blows the ball in the river –“

“What river?” he said

“- and the coach calls a time out and the left fielder has an attack of …of …” I trailed off.

“What the hell are you talking about, David?” he said.

Now I had him riled up, which was my intent. He jumped up just as Mel Allen faded away like a ship gone over the horizon and he started pounding on the radio again. Standing, he could wallop the radio harder. If Poor Mel had been inside the cabinet he would have had a terrible headache. Aunt Alice appeared in the doorway to the house.

“You should buy a real radio,” she said through the screen.

“The new ones are crap,” said Uncle Tip.

“Yeah,” I said ,”they’re not big enough to punch.”

Uncle Tip smiled at me for the first time that afternoon.

 “Can I make you a sandwich, David,” she asked, and I heard a degree of tiredness in her voice that as a teenager I would have never imagined had anything to do with me.

“Make him one quick, Alice,” Uncle Tip snapped, “so he can get outta my hair.”

I didn’t mention the obvious. He was as bald as a cantaloupe. Instead I ignored him.

“Can you make a Four Eyes Sandwich?” I asked Aunt Alice.

“I don’t think so,” she said, sounding even more tired.

“It’s my brother Mike’s favorite,” I said.

 “Tell her how to make it,” Uncle Tip said to me as he fooled with the radio knobs in the hope of a clearer signal. “You need to be on your way. There’s places to go, people to see, somebody else to bother.”

Aunt Alice opened the door and kind of sagged in the doorway. Her hand held on to the door knob and she slowly swung back and forth, supported by the door like a dance partner.

“I’d come in and make it myself,” I said, “but I’m no longer allowed to handle knives.”

 “Uh huh,” was her only reply. No opening there for another story. She knew me too well.

“Mike starts with two slices of toast,” I began, “and slathers on the peanut butter while he fries up baloney in a pan,” I said. “Then he adds a layer of his favorite jelly and builds up the pile. Just before plopping on the top slice of toast, he carefully makes the eyes by laying four large potato chips down on the blackened baloney and centers 4 slices of hard boiled egg on each chip. Shake a little paprika on the four eyes and you’ve got eye strain, what Mike calls the Red Eye Special.”

Aunt Alice’s color changed and she began to look a little woozy.

“The hot baloney turns the peanut butter into a golden brown cream,” I said. “Two tablespoons of mustard and anything green will dull it to the color of a Boy Scout tent, but wait till I tell you what he does just before serving.”

Even Mel Allen on the radio seemed to hush in anticipation.

“Now, my brother sets Mom's cookbook on top of his creation and puts his elbows on the front cover and presses down with his entire upper body weight.”

Aunt Alice put her hand to her mouth. I got up and walked over to Uncle Tip’s radio and tried to demonstrate, hoping Mel Allen wouldn’t mind.

“Get away from my radio,” was Uncle Tip’s predictable reaction.

“Then Mike takes the cookbook off and wipes it clean on his jeans,” I said, returning to my seat and feeling like I’d just been sent down from the blackboard for messing up an algebra equation or squeaking the chalk. “He squares off the mess with his pocket knife or a ruler from his book bag and wraps it in paper towels too keep it from oozing out all over the floor.”

Uncle Tip put his hand to his mouth and swallowed. Mel Allen began to cut in and out as if the ship over the horizon had carried the baseball game to the North Pole.

“When he uses the green boysenberry jelly,” I said, “it looks awful on the linoleum.”

“Uh huh,” said Aunt Alice, as she stepped onto the porch and let the screen door slam. She walked to the railing and steadied herself against it as if she was about to lean way out.

“And now Strike Three, as Mike calls it,” I said.  “Just before serving … to himself … he takes the squirt bottle of ketchup and injects 500 cc’s of the red stuff directly into the side of the paper wrapped sandwich. And guess what  oozes back out?   Purple,” I almost shouted.

Aunt Alice was still standing, but she swayed a little.

“Sometimes,” I said, “he lies back in his chair and squeezes the oozy part into his mouth like a chef squirts a bag of frosting on a cake.” Aunt Alice’s shoulder lurched, but she hung on to the railing.

“But if the ooze gets on anything, it dries and turns … brown.  It looks an awful lot like –“

The radio exploded with the roar of the crowd as the volume shot up by itself, but the speaker soon crackled and went dead. There was a burning smell in the air.

“And that’s the  Four Eyes Sandwich,” I said, feeling a little bilious myself.

No one said anything. It was one of those moments when everyone remains silent with their own thoughts. A wisp of smoke curled up from the back of the radio.

Uncle Tip squirmed around in his chair. Aunt Alice bent a little farther out over the rail and stared fixedly downward.

“I guess I’m not hungry,” I said

Little flames began to flicker from under the radio as it came back to life.

“Holy Moley,” said Uncle Tip.

“Brewer is ready.” Mel Allen said of the pitcher. “He delivers.”

While Uncle Tip and I sat mesmerized by the burning radio on the clothes hamper, Aunt Alice sprung to life.

“Mantle swings and sends a long drive over center field,” shouted Mel.

Aunt Alice grabbed the radio and threw it over the railing but it dangled there by its cord still attached to the wall plug

“Boy, oh boy” said Mel from inside the radio hanging twenty feet above the ground.  Flames licked out from everywhere on the radio and the cloth covering the speaker caught fire.  “It is going, going. It is gone … it is gone into the – “
 Aunt Alice pulled the plug from the outlet and the radio fell two stories and crashed into the ground.

We sat in stunned silence.

“Holy Moley,” said Uncle Tip.

Aunt Alice began to laugh.

“Maybe just a cookie, if you have one,” I said.

Quotes from Mel Allen were recorded by the radio network at the Yankees vs. Red Sox game on August 16, 1958.

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     Copyright 2013 David Griffin 

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

www.windsweptpress.com.

CONTINUED: Farmers

A favorite topic when brothers meet are shared memories, although many times one of us might say to the other, “Do you remember when we …” and receive a blank stare in return.  But more often we struck a vein of shared recollection and each of us took turns mining the gold and polishing it without guilt. 

Long ago we discovered that our overnight visit to a farm at ages seven and nine in the summer of 1949 produced in each of us an identical epiphany, a weekend we would never forget. A poet might say we were struck by an abiding image that became etched into our minds.  But to us it was simply a special memory to last a lifetime.  The visit to Uncle Ed and Aunt Ida’s farm would provide fond memories to pull out and re-live whenever we got the chance. 

"I'll never forget our visit to Uncle Ed's,” I said as I reached in front of Paul to grab the beer nuts.  The old pendulum wall clock behind the bar struck three o’clock as we stood drinking beer on a Saturday afternoon.  Mr. Walsh provided no stools.  And for some reason, no ash trays.

"Me, either,” said Paul. "What exactly do you remember?"

"Everything,"  I answered. "We drove all day to somewhere near Fulton."

"We left Utica early,” he said.  “It took all of Saturday morning to get there. I think we were near a town named Onionville."

"It seemed like we were there for a week," I said.

"Just Saturday and Sunday," he said "But we did a lot."

“We brought Grandma,” I said.

“Ed and Ida were her distant relatives,” said Paul.

“You and me and Grandma in the back seat,” I said

“All the way to Onionville,” said my brother. “There must be a reward in heaven for that.”

 “She gurgled,” I said.

“At both ends,” he said.

“Hey,” I said, “remember the pond?”

“It was a lily pond,” he said.  The shallow piece of water was suddenly vivid in my memory.  It was no more than 20 feet across.

"Out in front near the road, over toward the barn," I said.

"And we wondered,” he said, “if a frog could really sit on a lily pad without sinking it.”

  “Grandma would have certainly sunk it,” I said.

“We waited there for a frog to show up while Dad unpacked the car,” he said.  “We were always helpful.”

“You asked Grandma to sit in the pond,” I said. “She laughed and asked you why.”

His face became animated like an earnest nine year old.  “I told her it would be better than the best ... the best fart in a bathtub ever!”

We laughed loudly and from up the bar near the beer taps Mr. Walsh gave us the evil eye. He wiped his hands on a bar towel and began to move in our direction.  His trip was interrupted by a waitress from the restaurant side of the business seeking drinks for her customers.

       “Grandma was not a fan of toilet humor,” I said.

“She chased me around the yard,” he said, “and would have run through the lily pond to catch me.”

“Poor frogs,” I said.

As we talked I was amazed that both of us recalled so many details of a visit from almost thirty years before.

 “Do you remember riding the sulky mower with the sickle bar sticking out?” I asked.

“Yup,” he replied, “with the hired man.  His name was – “

“Skizzer,” I shouted.

“Skizzer,“ Paul shouted.

“Who would name their kid Skizzer?” I said.

“And do you remember watching them milk the cows?” he said.  “Uncle Ed had 31 milkers.”

“Yes,” I said, “with an 18,000 pound Rolling Herd Average”

“You’re full of crap,” Paul said.  “No seven year old would remember a Rolling Herd Average thirty years later.”

“Well, about 18,000 pounds,” I said, “give or take.”

“We had chicken and dumplings for supper,” Paul said.  “Aunt Ida said the bird was fresh killed early that afternoon.  Right out in the barn.”

“I remember,” I said.

“But you wouldn’t eat it,” he said, “because you’d been playing with the chickens that morning.”

“That’s not true,” I said.  “I remember every tasty morsel.  Besides, you don’t play with chickens.  They bite.”

“I didn’t know that,” he said, pouring beer from my bottle into his glass. “They looked so cute.”

“I had to explain to Estelle and Monica why their friend was missing,” I said.

”Who?” said Paul

“The remaining chickens.” I said.

 “You’re full of it. “ he said.

“But,” I said, “you wouldn’t eat any of the bullheads Uncle Ed raised in the pond.” I sounded triumphant like a younger brother.

“Of course not,” he said, “they’d just signed a truce with the frogs.”

“Stop drinking my beer,” I said.

“Hey, remember that old lumpy bed we had to sleep in?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I replied, “it was Skizzer’s and he offered to sleep in the bunk downstairs off the kitchen.”

“You wet the bed,” said Paul.
      ”I did like hell,” I almost shouted.

“I can still remember waking up thinking someone was pouring water on me,” he said.

“Maybe the window was open,” I said.

“Maybe you stood up in bed when you –“

“I did not wet the bed!” I shouted.

Behind the bar, Mr. Walsh began to move down our way.  He never liked anyone getting loud in his establishment. This was an Irish bar. Customers were expected to stand there and get loaded without making a lot of noise. 

Paul and I put on innocent faces, like those we practiced our entire boyhood for Dad when he heard us arguing at night and showed up in our room.

“I did eat the watermelon,” I said.

“We never ate a watermelon before,” said my brother.  “You asked for a fork.”

“For defense,” I said. “I thought I saw legs underneath it.”

     “Tony Talerico from Taylor Ave. told me he almost choked to death on the seeds when he first tried watermelon,” said Paul.  “But he was trying to eat the watermelon on one side of his mouth and store up the seeds on the other so he could spit them out at Bobby Jones.”

“At a high velocity,”  I said, “like a burp gun.”

“He got pretty good at it when we were in the Marine Corps together,” said Paul.

“Remember getting up at dawn?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said, “more milking.”

“And Sunday was Uncle Ed’s day to pick up all the other farmers’ milk cans and take them to the Dairy League,” I said.

“Aunt Ida said he chose that day to get out of going to church,” said Paul.

“They were Protestant, like Grandma,” I said.

“We wondered if it was a sin to miss church if you were Protestant,” he said.

“You asked Grandma,” I said.

“And she told me Protestants didn’t have as many rules as us,” he said

“Except for drinking,” I said.

“Yeah, some of them,” he said. “Good thing it’s not a sin for us Catholics.”

“Would it matter?” I said.

“No,” he said. “Not at this point.”

“Dad was upset when he found out there was no Catholic Church within miles to go to on Sunday morning,” I said.

“He probably thought we’d all go to hell,” Paul said.

“Grandma said God had better evidence than that to kick him off heaven’s invitation list,” I said.

“But Dad was a stickler for the rules,” said Paul.  “He told me once when I was a teenager I should tell the priest in confession if I had impure thoughts about Mary Lou Kowalski.”

“Who was she?” I said.

“Some girl I liked who became a nun,” he said.

I laughed. “Maybe you should have told her your thoughts, not the priest.”

“I don’t think she liked me enough to marry me,” said Paul.  “When she caught me looking at her in class, she’d stick her fingers down her throat and pretend to throw up.”

"Not a good omen," I said.

“She carried it too far one day and ruined her test paper.”

"She should have aimed for her ink well," I said.

He sighed. “I probably shouldn’t have tried to kiss her when we were up at the blackboard together working on algebra equations.”

"Really?"  I said.

"A thunderstorm knocked the electricity out and the room went dark," he said. "She screamed and threw her arms around me."

“That's understandable,” I said. “Deeper minds than mine have concluded sex and algebra don’t mix, until you add lightning."

He finally finished my bottle of beer, ordered another from Mr. Walsh and paid him from the few bills I had put down in front of me on the bar.

“That was some truck Uncle Ed had for the milk can run,” Paul said.

“He said it was ‘war surplus.’” I said. “No wonder we won.”

“We all rode up on the front seat,” I said.

“You and me and Dad and Uncle Ed driving,” said Paul.

“It was a huge truck,” I said. “The top of the dashboard was over my head.  All I could see were puffy white clouds up through the windshield.”

“I don’t know if Uncle Ed could see much more,” he said. “Don’t you remember he forgot his glasses?”

“That’s right,” I said.  “Dad had to read the road name signs to him.”

“Uncle Ed kept saying, ‘Jack this can’t be Onion Ring Road, it ain’t bumpy enough.’”

“So he did a three point turn, or tried to,” I said.

“Drove us right in the ditch,” said Paul.  “Good thing we were near a house with a phone.”

“Skizzer came and pulled us out with old Donner and Blitzen,” I said.  “Too bad we never got to ride those horses.  Why go to a farm if you can’t ride the horses?”

“I thought he called the horses Dancer and Prancer,” said Paul.

“No,” I said, “that’s what he called us when you and I were running around the house looking for the bathroom.”

“Mom wasn’t pleased when Aunt Ida told her it was out in the back yard,” said Paul.

“A two-holer,” I said. “Uncle Ed said it was more modern than the old one.  A big improvement.”

“I suppose,” he said.

“If you had a bad cold and couldn’t smell,” I said.

“Ah well, it was a great weekend,” said Paul.  “Except for the ride home.”

“Fog as thick as milk,” I said. “Dad got out and walked ahead while Mom drove along slowly so he could make sure we stayed on the pavement.”

“Only through one or two really deep dips in the road,” said Paul.
”Good thing we weren’t on the Thruway,” I said.

“Wasn’t built yet,” he answered.

“The fog scared Grandma,” I said.

“Scared the gas right out of her,” he said.

“She erupted,” I added, laughing.

“Maybe that was the real reason why Dad got out and walked ahead of the car,” said Paul.

Mr. Walsh made his way down the bar to us again. “You boys want another?” he asked. His grey eyebrows arched and he looked like he wanted us to say no.

We decided it was time to leave.  Outside, autumn’s late afternoon sun was quickly heading down in the sky.  We walked across the street to our parked cars in the small shopping center opposite what was then King Cole Ice Cream.

“Would you ever want to live on a farm? Paul asked.

“Yes,” I said.  “It can afford a healthy and wonderful life. I picture myself sitting around the old kitchen in the morning waving goodbye to my hired hands as they go out to the barn and fields to do all the work.”

“This has a familiar ring,” he said.

“I remain behind in the kitchen to flirt with the young milkmaid. In the afternoon after a brisk ride on Donner or Dancer or whoever, I casually wait for my factotum to arrive back from the city with baskets of cash from the sale of our milk, cheese and whatever else you grow on a farm.”

“You always liked someone else doing your work for you,” he said.

“You should remember,” I said, “that on the few occasions when Mom insisted we wash the supper dishes, it was you who always made me dry the silverware and the glasses while you took the easy job of drying the plates.”

“We were a good team, though,” he said.  “We mostly talked her out of it, said we had too much homework to do.”

“Or that Sister Hyronica said we should watch The Lone Ranger that night,” I said, “because the episode had a Christian message.”

“Mom believed you, even when the show was about a mine explosion,” he said, “and you told her it was the silver mine where Judas’ thirty pieces of silver came from.”

“She didn’t really believe us,” I said.

“You’re right,” he said.   “She just loved us.”

“She was a pushover for sure,” I said.

“I wonder how many times in our boyhood  we actually did the dishes,” he said.
”Eighteen times,” I said. “I counted them.”

He made a scoffing noise. “You’re full of –

     “Manure,” I said.  “Cow manure.”

Paul stopped walking abruptly and looked at me.

“You pushed me into that cow pie near the barn when we came home from the milk run.  Don’t say you didn’t.”

“Not on purpose,” I said. “I was running from Estelle and Monica.  They knew I ate their best friend.”

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            copyright David Griffin, 2013

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

www.windsweptpress.com

CONTINUED Remember Me

I’m thirteen years old, sitting under a tree  along the side of the fairway on Utica’s  Valley View golf course,  thinking of everything I’ll do in life, now that I’m a man.   The sky is a blazing splash of blue, with a few white puffy October clouds blowing across to the horizon.  Someday, I’m sure I’ll fly up there among the clouds. 

 I’m sixteen years old and walking along Genesee Street on Saturday night with a real girl on our way to the movies.  She has the smell of perfume and the wind and the rain in her hair.  I’m the happiest teen alive. 

 I’m twenty two years old and standing at the altar in a church as the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met comes down the aisle.  I will cherish her.  Regrettably, I will sometimes make her cry.  I will always love her.  She is my life.

 I’m 23 years old and I’m looking at my first born, a son, my pride and my occasional challenge.   And then  I’m 25 years old at the birth of  the second most beautiful woman in the world, my daughter, who might someday be displaced in that role by her two daughters.  You could not have convinced me that children were that important before I became a father.  You cannot convince me otherwise today.

 I remember standing at the side of each of my children as they were married.  On each of their wedding days, I was the most dazed of the guests.  I can’t believe what I started. 

 Then,  too quickly it seems, I’m sitting here at the keyboard, older now, but happy for the way my life has played out.  I can’t see what’s up ahead on the highway, but I can see where I’ve been, where I came from.  I know who I am when I remember me.

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copyright 2007 by David Griffin

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

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CONTINUED: Mom and the U.S. Constitution

As I grew toward puberty and asked Mom who gave her the authority to Lord it over me, her answer snapped back without hesitation. "GOD anointed me. Now go clean up your room!"  At age twelve I was almost as tall as the little woman.  When I offered to arm wrestle her to determine if it was really my turn to do the dishes, she accepted.  And won.

Even as an adult I was often surprised to learn how aware she was of what was going on when I was younger.  I began to suspect she may have in the past been a teenager herself. On one occasion while we were discussing my years in high school, Mom told me she and Dad were proud they’d been able to put their sons through Catholic schools.  In a familiar manner of loving derision that after a certain age always got her laughing, I said nothing but began to pick my nose.

“Well, it’s true,” she said. “You certainly must remember at least one thing your Catholic education did for you.”

With a twinkle in my eye, I said, "Well it limited me to dating girls who wouldn’t put out.”

“You think I didn’t know that?” she said.
In reality it was the respect my father had for her that taught me to not pester girls beyond a certain point.

Even with a sixth sense for tracking her boys, the United States Constitution would not allow my mother’s brand of punishment to violate an inmate’s  human rights. Mom might do a great job running the State Prison, but she would eventually spend all her time in court defending herself against civil rights suits.

The Constitution also serves to prevent the practice of Mom-ism outside prison walls by those who want to control us as though we are children.  Laws  said to protect us continue to whittle away our freedoms.  Rights are demoted to privileges and whatever is dangerous becomes licensed. We see this over-protective attitude in the public sphere’s fixation on safety and security.  Often the new laws and regulations seem very practical.

But that's the great thing about America.  Sometimes we’re willing to replace practical wisdom with impractical abstractions, because without an impractical idea like freedom our personal abilities could not unlock our promise.  We wouldn’t live up to our potential nor mature as a nation. 

My mother knew when to stop acting like a Mom.  It was probably difficult for her.  Allowing me to follow my own paths as I grew up may have seemed impractical to her at times.  But she knew I would in some ways be rid of her in the future, as she had grown beyond her parents.  I would build a worthwhile life based on my freedom rather than another person's wisdom, even hers.

The power Mom wielded over me as a child was long ago replaced by a mutual respect, built brick by brick while I advanced to maturity.  Mom became important to me as a person and not as a set of rules.  I was free to do as I pleased, to enjoy the fruits or accept the consequences of my actions.  She might have continued to insist I obey her, but she was smart enough to know that seldom succeeded.  Instead she let the reins slacken a little at a time while she rode herd on my adolescence and I galloped toward my independence.  I arrived there certainly not without her help, but without her holding my hand.  But I suppose that’s just a son’s opinion.

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Copyright 2012, 2016 by David Griffin

The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

www.windsweptpress.com