Mum and Dad: Part One

Mum and Dad: PART ONE

as dad told it, he first realized that mum was the one for him when, as part of a church or school group, he was invited to her 6 year birthday party.

because of the number of kids there and time constraints he had to leave without getting the chance to give mum her present in person.

he recalled telling a friend disconsonately "tell joan it's from michael."

mum first realized dad was for her when, in their late teens, they ran into each other at "twilight", one of the huge dance halls that dotted rural america in the 30's and 40's and which brought big-time entertainers like benny goodman and a young frank sinatra to the hinterland.

as mum told it, when dad walked in, with his full head of pomaded black hair and dressed in an all-white suit, that was it. years later they could laugh at that all-white suit but magic occurs in strange forms and that night it wore vestments of white.

mum kept the suit preserved until the day she died, which occurred on my father's birthday.

as far as we could tell, it wasn't long after "twilight" that that they eloped to laurel maryland and were married.

i say "as far as we could tell" because we never knew their anniversary date. it wasn't talked about and wasn't celebrated as a family event. we always suspected that that was because if you "did the math," mike III's birth would fall damningly short of the 9-month mark.

mum had strong opinions and didn't recoil from rendering judgments but one subject that she was noticeably soft-hearted on was grils who had "premature" births.

mum had her contentious moments with all of us, and especially with mikeIII and mary jane but of all the harsh words she ever spoke to and about them, not a discouraging one was heard about mike having gotten mary jane pregnant out of wedlock.

"only the good girls get pregnant," she used to say, "the bad ones know to use protection." that was a little too facile, too pat, for mum's personality.

mum was a voracious reader. the quintessential image i have is of her sitting in a chair reading. she only had a high school education--and a one-room-schoolhouse-in-rural-pennsylvania one at that--but she had a very good vocabulary as a consequence of her reading and thus a medium for expressing her thoughts, which were those of an agile mind. it was at times a combustible combination.

i always thought that the abrupt, sometimes inexplicable losses of temper and of downright meanness that she exhibited were in significant measure due to that combustible combination, and the container--that of housewife from the 1930's-1980's in small town america--that it was forced to exist in, and occasionally to resist. i don't think mum was in any significant regard aware of this. her upsets seemed to puzzle her as much as they did the rest of us.

then too, she was smarter than dad so you had a confluence of conditions that led to frustration, questioning, uncertainty, fear, guilt, denial, anger, more guilt and sorrow. i think the wonder is not that she had the upsets that she did but that she didn't have more of them.

mum and i talked a lot. i don't know exactly to what extent she talked to me more, if at all, than with my brothers--i never really asked them about it--, but i honestly believe she opened up a little more with me than with the others, or even with dad on some subjects. at least she told me she did and on more than one occasion while i was a teenager, dad would tell me in exasperation "go talk to your mother," or "ben, you can talk to your mother, go talk to her." the subject matter of these i don't remember.

nowhere were mum's existential difficulties greater exhbited than in her relationship with her own mother, who we boys referred to as "gram."


-benjamin harris