Birthday Memories

Today’s my mother’s birthday. Had she not died in 1996, she would have turned 85 today.

Like many people, I am still conflicted about my former relationship with my parents. Freud would have been very interested in the way I interacted with my mother, but I largely discount Freud. Psychologist Nancy Hazan would have also wanted to explore that relationship, and I’ll grudgingly admit that Hazan may have something significant to contribute about my earliest attachments.

Of course, I was much too young to remember it, but soon after I was born I was given to my maternal grandparents to raise while my parents trucked off to Washington, D.C. to establish careers. My father had a son by an earlier marriage who was also given to the grandparents, in this case, the paternal grandparents. The difference was that I eventually was reunited with my folks, while my half-brother never came to live with us.

Those who met my parents before their deaths commonly told me “I don’t know how you turned out as well as you did.” Implied in that comment was the understanding that even though I was far, far from perfect, with the environment I grew up in, and the parental influences I had, the fact that I wasn’t a serial killer, or worse, was a remarkable achievement. I once mentioned this to one of the college classes I was teaching and one young woman expressed surprise. “I took you has having an Ozzie and Harriet upbringing!” she said. Ozzy and Sharon, more like.

Upon my mother’s death, my children and I went to her memorial service in her home town in North Carolina. Everyone was predictably nice. After hearing comment after comment from well-wishers telling me what a wonderful person my mother was, my teenaged daughter took me aside and asked in a whisper “Are they really talking about Grandma!?”

There’s an incident that I recall from my own high school years that I think is telling. I was hoping to open a bottle of cola and was unable to find the bottle opener anywhere (remember when cola bottles needed an opener?). I searched and searched without success. I finally asked my mother. She told me it was in the junk drawer in the kitchen, the one that I had just finished searching. So I searched it again. This time I took out every piece of equipment I found in the drawer, one item at a time. No bottle opener.

Fine. I decided to do without the cola.

Twenty minutes later I was out on the enclosed sun porch looking for a magazine I had left there, and there, on the breakfast nook table, was the missing bottle opener. I had already decided against having a drink, so I left the opener there, retrieved the magazine, and went into the living room to read it.

About thirty minutes later my mother loudly announced that she had found the bottle opener for me. She came into the living room and placed it in my hand. “Where did you find it?” I asked. “In the kitchen junk drawer, just like I told you it’d be,” she replied.

It was a little thing, but very telling. She would rather lie to me, than lose “face.”

I don’t think either of my parents thought very highly of themselves. They were from Appalachian origins, and neither was college educated. In the high octane world of Washington, D.C., such limitations must have been embarrassing. So they pretended to be better than they were. I know they fooled some. Perhaps they even fooled themselves. But their constant efforts at face saving even at the expense of the truth, or at the expense of a genuine and healthy home-life, was an extreme price to pay.

It troubles me in my adult life, even now.

Death of a Friend

My friend Chris died on Friday, July 1st. He was only 61. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in March and died in July. It’s difficult to believe.

Chris had such good health habits I was sure he’d outlast us all. I wish he had. There’s a superstition among medical personnel that nice people are more likely to get cancer than others, and that nice people are less likely to survive it. Based on the way too early deaths of Chris and our mutual friend Joe B., who died in his 40s of cancer, I wonder if there’s not something to it. The jerks of the world seem to live forever. Chris used to fantasize about all “the guys” being in a nursing home together in our old age, “Oh boy! It’s Tuesday! Tuesday is green Jell-O day!”

The thing I will always remember most about Chris is that loud, burbling, flock of geese honking laugh. Because that laugh was so unique, and because Chris laughed a lot, it was always easy to know when Chris was around.

I also will always remember that he had a habit of quoting Monty Python movies. One line he liked to pipe up with, often for no apparent reason, came from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “Are you suggesting that coconuts migrate?”

His favorite though was from The Life of Brian. It comes from a scene, set in biblical days, in which Brian’s mother is revealing that Brian’s father was not really Mr. Cohen, but actually a Roman. Chris did both voices, first Brian’s “You mean you were raped?!!” and then the high falsetto of Brian’s mother “Well, at first.” After hearing Chris do that shtick a couple of dozen times, we learned that anytime, anywhere. someone could say “You mean you were raped?” and Chris would squeak “Well, at first.”

I was once dating a woman named Belle who knew and liked Chris. We were up late watching a Law and Order rerun, and Belle had fallen asleep on the couch. During the climax of the court scene toward the end of the show, the prosecutor was examining the witness and asked her “You mean you were raped?!!” and (the supposedly sleeping) Belle piped up “Well, at first.”

If someone was commiserating about students, or administration, or...whatever, Chris might ask them “Haven’t you read Dr. Phil’s latest book on...” and he’d fill in the blank with whatever fit the topic being discussed. If you believed Chris, Dr. Phil has written a book on about every subject, and Chris has read it.

The man had a mind for mischief too. He would approach one of the guys and announce, “You know, don’t you, that Bones is FURIOUS at you!” (or Jim, or Allan or Ted). This of course was always a surprise to whomever he was pulling this joke on, and he could milk it for days.

Over a period of a couple of years, Chris would call the campus bookstore at then end of the semester, pretending to be Richard S. He would complain loud and long that the mortarboard he had rented for the graduation exercises the year before was way too large, and demand that THIS year’s rental be smaller. Subsequently, each year Richard found his rented graduation cap getting smaller and smaller until he could barely keep it balanced atop his head with pins to keep it perched there.

Chris was a sound believer that the one with the most toys won. He liked gadgets. He pretended to be worried that each of us owned four motor vehicles and that I might buy one more and he’d be behind. He was greatly relieved when I sold one of my cars, and he added a Jeep to his. From that point on there was no competition; Chris never seemed to sell a vehicle, keeping them on, in running order, like old friends that he just couldn’t bear to part with.

Chris was an incredible babe magnet. He liked women, and women liked him. Even in his 50s and 60s he could attract the attention of young pretty women in their 20s. It was a gift. Many a time I’d have young women come into my office and ask personal questions about Chris and then admit to a “crush” on him. His classes always had the honeys, which was odd because he taught astronomy and physics. Me? I’m a psychology teacher with women students who are commonly tattooed, pierced, middle-aged, and freshly out of rehab. Like I said, it was a gift.

There was an ambivalence about Chris that was telling. He was very proud of his service in the air force, but angry about the military policy that had placed him in Vietnam. He surprised me once by suggesting that the United States government apologize to the Vietnamese people for what we had done to them. And yet, one of the things we had in common was our love for military history; we’d watch Battlefield Detectives and discuss the shows at length at coffee the next morning.

Chris was a good guy. We’d do “field research” together for my Sex class in topless bars here in Tulsa. We met for coffee two or three times a week for 16 years. I don’t think in all that time we ever had a cross word for each other (something I can’t claim for others in our clique). I don’t have many friends. I just lost one of the few I had. He will be missed.