Echoes of Mom

This is the next installment in the “Sunday Story” series of essays –no politics – just stories. It would be my Mom’s 103rd birthday on June 25th. Happy Birthday Mom!!!

Dawn Forty

At the moment we have five – that’s right – five dogs in our house.  I’ve told the stories before, but the short version is we had two rescue dogs, Buddy and Atticus.  Then there was the first “foster fail”, Keelie, found on I-75 in Northern Kentucky, who came to be fostered but bonded so much with all of us that she stayed.  And then there was Louisiana, a full story of his own (Lou’s Saga), who came to rehab.  He and Keelie bonded so tightly that we couldn’t let him go either.

Now there’s a new rescue pit bull puppy, CeCe.  Our group, Lost Pet Recovery, pulled her from a storm sewer over near Dayton.   She’s a sweetheart, and will make someone a wonderful adoptee.  But she’s not going to stay –  five is more than we care to handle, and a puppy is still a puppy.

But it’s five dogs right now, and the day starts with a push from Lou, a lick from Atticus, and a scratch from Buddy – all around 5:40 am.  And it’s not just open the door and let ‘em go in our fenced-in backyard.  Lou still has to be walked, and so does CeCe.  So 5:40 means get up, get dressed, and get outside.

Red Skies

This morning I stumbled behind Lou, searching for “land mines” in the half-morning light.  I finally got the chance to look up, and there in the east, it was a full orange sky.  The sun wasn’t visible yet, just below the horizon, but the clouds were fully lit.  I was reminded of my Mom, full of sayings from her upbringing in England.

“Red sky at night, sailors delight.  Red sky at dawn, sailors take warning”.   That’s a phrase that went trans-Atlantic long before Mom stepped off the boat, the Liberty Ship Francis D Culkin, in Portland, Maine in the winter of 1946.  And the phrase still has meaning, by our second outing around 7:00 am, the clouds were gathering for the storm of the day.

Hacking

There’s nothing worse than a dog with a cough.  First of all, it gives us nightmares of Atticus, who had “Kennel Cough” so badly when we first got him, we thought he was going to choke to death.  A midnight run to the dog Emergency Room at MedVet up in Worthington to be greeted by vets in full hazmat suits made the illness even more memorable.  So when Keelie started hacking the other day, our first move was to the records.  She has had all her shots, including Bordetella, the official name for Kennel Cough.  

But she was still coughing, and it brought another of Mom’s sayings to mind, an English nursery rhyme. 

I have a little cough, sir,
In my little chest sir,
Every time I cough, sir,
It leaves a little pain, sir,
Cough, cough, cough, cough,
There it is again, sir.

Mom knew a lot about coughing.  She had asthma as a child, and one of her mother’s remedies was to find a road construction project, and have Mom inhale the fumes by hanging over the tar barrel.  Mom knew all about “Vick’s Vapo Rub” and the electric “Vaporizer”, the steam machine that she put in our bedrooms when we were sick to help us breath.  I can still remember falling asleep to the gentle hiss of the steam escaping the steel coffee pot-like base.

That’s a story that came back around.  Mom never smoked, but it was pulmonary fibrosis, a hardening of the lungs, that ended her life after ninety-three years.  The “little cough” became more than she could bear.

Pots and Kettles

In our modern age of gas and electric stoves, the outsides of pots and kettles remain clean.  It took my first camping adventure as a new Boy Scout to really grasp one of Mom’s favorite phrases: “…that’s the pot calling the kettle black”.  We made a traditional Scout dish, Dinty Moore Beef Stew dumped in the big pot, and cooked over the open fire.  It takes a lot of stirring, otherwise half of the stew will end up burnt to the bottom of the pot, and the rest will taste like you’re eating ashes.  

But it was the cleanup when us newly minted Tenderfoot Scouts learned a hard lesson.  The black ash from the burning wood adhered to the outside of the pots.  It took steel wool pads and a lot of scrubbing to get the pot even close to being clean again.  But somehow, the “leaders” pot came clean almost right away.  They waited for us to get done scrubbing, then explained that they “soaped” their pot.  They put a thin layer of liquid soap all over the outside of the pot, to make it easier to wash off the black layer of soot.

Mom grew up in 1920’s England.  The main source of fuel for both heating and cooking was coal, and my Nana (grandmother) had a coal fired oven.  Maybe that’s another reason Mom had such a tough time breathing.  Anyway, the pots and kettles were always covered with soot from the burning coal.  The pot could “call” the kettle black, but the pot was just as black as the kettle.  It was another version of “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”.

Noses and Faces

One of Mom’s favorite phrases was “Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face”.  I never really got that one as a kid,  I guess I didn’t get the whole “spite” thing.  In fact, I think I heard the expression wrong anyway – I always thought she said “despite your face”.  What would that mean, you cut off your own nose, despite the fact it’s on your own face?  It just didn’t make sense.

Eventually I got the meaning – don’t get so mad at your face you cut off your nose and make it look even worse.  As a “hot tempered” guy myself, I heard the phrase from Mom a lot.  Don’t do something in anger that would make the situation even worse.  But I never got the nuance of the “spite” part.

It was actually when I started to do a lot of the writing in “Our America” that I finally got the real sentiment of the phrase.  “Word” spell checker constantly corrected my use of the word “inspite” (it just did it again) because I thought it was a single word.  So I always corrected it to “despite”, with a similar but not exact same meaning.  One day I accidently put a space in “in spite” and “Word” was happy – and I finally got it.  To spite – to be angry – at yourself.

Saints

Mom was raised Roman Catholic.  When she fell in love with a Jewish man, my Dad, her religious teachings came in direct conflict with her heart.  It wasn’t that she couldn’t marry Dad, but she had to promise to raise their children in the Catholic Church.  That was something that Dad couldn’t agree to.  So they had a civil ceremony three months before D-Day in 1944. The “legendary” story was that the priest came over to tell Mom she was ex-communicated from the church, and my Bampa (grandfather) punched him in the nose.  I guess I got my hot temper honestly.

When Mom and Dad raised us in Cincinnati, we attended the Episcopal Church.  Episcopalians are the American version of the Church of England, the Anglican Church, which is as close to Catholicism as you can get without actually being Catholic.  Dad would fall asleep, but Mom and my sisters and I would attend Sunday services until we were in our teens.  

Mom’s Catholic upbringing would come up in surprising ways.  She was a woman of faith, and her faith included that she could ask for heavenly intercession to solve real world problems.  We were vacationing in Canada and attended the village festival at the small town of Bruce Mines.  Somewhere in the dark, wandering back to the car, I lost my glasses in the high grass.  My vision was pretty bad (worse now), so not having glasses even at a young age was a problem.

Lost Things

The next day we drove back to Bruce Mines, and began searching the field for my glasses.  Mom “raised the stakes”, praying over and over to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost things, to find my glasses.  After some seeking, St. Anthony came through, and we plucked my glasses from between the stalks of grass.

In fact, St. Anthony almost always came through.  The only time I remember him failing, was when Mom put my driver’s education certificate in a “safe place”.  After  I completed my time behind the wheel, I needed that piece of paper to actually get a license, but it was nowhere to be found, not even in the secret drawer in the circular table in the living room.  We even “moved up the heavenly chain” to St. Jude, the patron saint of impossible causes, but to no avail.

I had to file to the state to get a new copy, and it took months to get the paperwork straight.  I was sixteen, with a car waiting for me in the driveway, so I was impatient.  The Saints failed us, and I had to wait until the end of February (my birthday is in September) to actually get my license and go out on the road.  

That failure haunted me.  When Mom passed away, and Dad moved to Cleveland, I went through the paperwork in the house with a fine toothed comb.  Sure, it was forty years later and twelve cars later.  But I still wanted to find that certificate.  Divine intervention didn’t work. Perhaps it was superseded by maternal intervention to delay my solo driving efforts. 

 I guess I won’t find that one out, at least for a while. But I have faith that someday I will get to ask the question.

The Sunday Story Series

Author: Marty Dahlman

I'm Marty Dahlman. After forty years of teaching and coaching track and cross country, I've finally retired!!! I've also spent a lot of time in politics, working campaigns from local school elections to Presidential campaigns.

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