Joyce’s Reviews > The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell > Status Update

The nurses brought in a hospital bed for my mother. “I’ve slept with that man for twenty years,” she said, weeping. “I’m not going to stop now.”

He needed me to be the man of the house. I was just eighteen, but then, so were some of those men taken from the jungles of Vietnam on a stretcher.

I recall this moment as the moment I became a man. It had not been my first beer or hangover, or the first time I’d gotten laid, as I had thought. It had not even been earlier that day, when I’d tossed my blue graduation cap into the air. It was the moment my mother needed me, and I was there for her.

But to my mother—I suspect to all mothers—their little boys will always be their little boys, no matter how old those boys become.

~~~~~

My mother had ironed the fabric until the pleats could cut paper.

expect that of our grandparents. Not our parents. For some reason, we think our parents will never grow old, perhaps because when they do, we are forced to acknowledge that we will one day grow old, and we face our own mortality.

“None of us is getting out of here alive.”

“You know, son, it’s not the school that makes the student.”

I’d be worried my children would be like me, you know. Have my eyes.

“They should be so lucky,” she said.

“Lucky?”

“Yes. They made you the person you are, and I happen to believe you’re a very good person, Sam Hill.”

I’d applied to the University of California schools, which had negligible tuition for California residents and were a better fit for my family’s budget.

This time we didn’t need to leave six inches for the Holy Spirit, as we did in grammar school.

If there was one thing I had learned about my mother, it was that she did not make idle threats.

“No way, young man. You do not call a young lady on the phone to ask her to the prom. You drive to her house and ask her proper.”