Random Cool Things About my Mom

Mother's Day Mailer WHAT DOESN'T COME NATURALLY

Random Cool Things About my Mom

1. She has a tattoo of a star on her left inner thigh. She got this done with three friends from Pine Manor in Scolley Square in Boston in the fall of 1957, and used to charge a quarter at deb parties to show it to people.

2. Mom and her roommate, Anne Batterson, used to keep their "revolution clothes" in the bottom drawer of their dorm-room bureau at Pine Manor: white jeans and black turtlenecks. Just in case.

3. Mom raised three kids without a lot of help from her first two husbands. Like, NONE. Dad paid child support up until 1972, when I was eight. And then she took in a fourth kid, a twelve-year-old friend of ours for whom it was no longer safe to be at home. That takes serious ovaries, my friends.

4. In the early Sixties, at a friend's housewarming party on Centre Island, Mom got up on the beams two stories above the living room and started doing The Twist. This guy called Tony Peck followed her up there, but didn't have quite as good a sense of balance. He broke and arm and a leg when he fell.

He lived, though. Here is is in Palm Beach, recently.

5. Mom broadjumped seventeen feet. In eighth grade.

6. No matter what, if something cool and cultural came to town when we were kids, Mom made sure we were there. I especially remember the flamenco dancers.

7. She is always finding us treasures at garage sales. Occasionally, some really weird shit. But mostly intensely personally ideal treasures, because she knows each of us so well. She found me a tuxedo at the St. Vincent de Paul in Salinas, the summer I was a junior in high school. I wore it for my yearbook picture--she got a pretty famous photographer to take the pix of me, too.

8. She hates the death penalty, and has done a great deal to try to end it.

9. She took us to peace marches, and now she has taken my daughter to one, too.

10. She took me with her when she helped bring food to striking farm workers in Salinas when I was a kid. She even brought a box of Pampers, just in case there were little kids in the group. It turned out they were all young guys. They thought the diapers were really funny. The sheriff came and made us leave, but we were on the mailing list for the AFL-CIO's newspaper for years after that--lots of stories about "Teamster Thugs" in every issue. Lots of smiling pix of Cesar Chavez.

11. Whenever I used to tell her my marriage was in trouble, she'd say, "well, for God's sake, don't take any advice from ME. I'm in awe that you and your sister have lasted this long, with your husbands. After five years I always get bored."

12. I think she probably has about a thousand friends. Seriously. People she adores who adore her in return. And she is always making more. She's about the most effervescent person EVER.

13. She collects cans of weird food, which she has displayed in her last four or so kitchens. To the extent that people send them to her for Christmas and stuff. Right now the grossest is a can of "Kitchen-Sliced Slugs." When we were kids, she had a can of elephant meat and a can of rattlesnake meat--both "in creme sauce."

One night, she served them to us over noodles. For dinner.

My sister and I found this revolting, and told her so.

"You should eat it," said Mom. "That way you'll always have something to talk about at cocktail parties."

She was right.

14. In 1968, she tried to paint her Volkswagen Beetle, which was looking a little rough. Halfway through the project, she got invited out for dinner in New York. There were bugs stuck in the paint forever afterward.

15. Sometime in the late eighties, she found some boat paint on sale. She bought it because she was about to go down to Florida to help a boyfriend rehab a boat he'd just bought. She decided to bring the paint along in her checked luggage. It blew up in the baggage compartment. All over Cecily Tyson's luggage. Poor Cecily.

16. When my sister's boyfriend Mark proposed, and Mom came to New York and cooked us all dinner, she hid a plastic spider on top of the heart in Mark's artichoke. "He needs to know what he's getting into, with all of us," she said.

17. When my twin daughters were born, Mom came to New York and stayed with us for a month. "Mummie and Daddy got me a baby nurse for me when all of you were born," she said, "and it's a wonderful help." She slept on the sofa in our tiny living room, and split overnight feeding shifts with my husband so I could sleep. She should be beatified for that alone.

18. She made it possible for my sister and me to travel around the world for a year together, when we'd both graduated from college.

(Me and Freya's beau, Tony Ruwald, on Bali in 1988. I look pretty good after three months of dysentery.)

19. On that trip, Mom came to India and met up with us. The third morning we were in Delhi, she looked out the window and said, "I hate India. It's just so Sixties."

20. But she travelled all over with us anyway--to Jaipur, to Agra, to Kashmir, and on to Nepal. In Nepal, we went trekking to the base camp of Annapurna. The trek was led by her Pine Manor roommate, Anne Batterson--who was herself on her honeymoon with her second husband David, an Episcopal priest. David then performed my wedding ceremony, and christened my daughters.

21. Mom thought the lyrics to Donna Summers' "Hot Stuff" were about hot tubs, as in, "I wanna hot tub baby this evening/I wanna hot tub baby t0ni-igh-ight."

22. Once, when I called a kid in my fourth-grade class "a homo," Mom looked at me very seriously and said, "Cornelia, do you even know what that MEANS?" I said, "Duh. Homo sapiens..."

To her credit, I almost couldn't tell how hard she was laughing.

23. When my sister Freya was really depressed once, during college, she came home to where Mom was living on Long Island.

"Mom," she said. "I'm really depressed."

"You know," replied Mom, "Anne Batterson's daughter was really depressed a while ago, so Anne took her to Elizabeth Arden for the day..."

Freya looked up at her hopefully.

"So," continued Mom, "maybe I should take you to get a tattoo. I just saw this place out near Belmont racetrack."

24. Freya got a tattoo of a dollar sign, because she wanted to work on Wall Street.

25. That spring break, I was incredibly depressed, having just found out that I'd failed a couple of courses on my junior year in Ireland, and wouldn't be graduating on time.

"You know," said Mom, "when Freya was depressed over Christmas, we got her a tattoo. Cheered her right up."

26. I got a cents sign. That was Mom's idea, when I couldn't think of anything I wanted.

"You can tell people your mother said you needed more sense," she said.

Luckily, my pal Candace says "it stands for change." She should know, I got her a tattoo at that same place out by Belmont a couple of months later, when she was really depressed.

27. Mom works really hard to support a homeless shelter in Monterey, and she's on the domestic violence council for the county.

28. For her seventieth birthday, Mom wore black knickers, striped socks, and these weird clog things with "70" emblazoned on each one, in gold sequins.

29. One year, we made her a monogrammed towel for Christmas, with iron-on calico letters. Her initials went all the way around to the back, with a hyphen.

30. Mom says she wants to found Marriage Anonymous. "That way, when I feel a wedding coming on, I can call a friend and they'll talk me out of it."

31. Mom is damn sure she was a bulldancer on Crete in a previous life. I believe it.

32. Mom used to take us out of school every once in a while, just to go on picnics.

33. This summer, Mom is taking us all on a cruise to Alaska. Like, TEN of us. To celebrate my daughter's and niece's graduation from high school.

"That's what grandmothers should DO," she said. "Things we can remember forever."

34. When the husband of a friend of Mom's died recently, Mom called her every morning for a couple of months, just to check in.

"Someone did it for me," she explained. "It helps."

35. The night before we drove across the country one summer in the early Seventies, our favorite babysitter in Carmel came over for dinner--Dana Angel, aged sixteen.

Mom said, "You should come with us tomorrow. You've never seen the East Coast, and it's pretty interesting."

Dana went home and packed. We had a great time with her that summer.

36. Mom always picks up female hitchhikers. Once it turned out the hitchhiker was Cousin Susie Read, on her way to visit us. We kept her "CARMEL" sign over the shelves of weird food in our kitchen for years after that--she'd made it on shirt cardboard, with each letter done in a different color crayon. Mom also put up a great photo of Susie in our downstairs hallway--black-and-white, of Susie sitting on a motorcycle, wearing a Superman suit.

37. Mom took me to Florida this winter. "I figure you'll want to get out of New Hampshire, around February," she said.

A friend of hers who used to be homeless in Carmel but now lives in Florida lent us a car to drive around in. He's doing really well now.

38. The year before, she took me and my daughter to Hawaii for New Year's. I am not sure where she finds the money to do so much for us. But it's amazingly lovely that she does. And she is the world's best partner on a road trip.