I AM NOT LIKE MY MOTHER

My mother, and her siblings, try to make light of a bad situation. My mother broke out a front tooth and couldn’t afford to get it fixed. She looked awful with that big black gap in her smile. Sometimes the would keep her mouth shut or cover her mouth with her hand. But sometimes she would just laugh about it and make jokes and funny faces. It was about a year before she got it fixed. That was in Muskogee when I was about nine.

My mother loved to help people. I think maybe she enjoyed finding someone who had less than she had. She didn’t hesitate to feed a hobo. We had hobos in the years following World War II. They would come down the alley behind our house and offer to cut grass or sharpen your kitchen knives. My mother would fix a plate of food for them and never let them do any work for it. We barely had enough food for us but she never turned them away.

My mother would panic and over-react when a problem popped up. In Minnesota she was driving our 1937 Plymouth on a two lane highway when a roll off tar paper fell off a truck going the other way. Mandy, Pepper, Marvin, and I were in the car. The roll of tar paper was pretty big, perhaps 70 pounds. It hit the front of the car and broke the tie rod. As a result the two front wheels went opposite directions and it was impossible to steer. The car went off the road to the right, and down an embankment about as deep as the height of the car. There was some water at the bottom of the ditch. We all started getting out of the car.

My mother yelled: “Don’t you all get out, you’ll drown!”

We all got back in the car. I remember being on my knees in the back seat looking out the back window and seeing my mother running away down the highway.

The truck that dropped the tar paper had stopped and the driver had gotten out to check on the car in the ditch. The driver chased my mother and stopped her, and brought her back to the car. She said she didn’t know where she was going. I believe her.

One time my Aunt Judy was at our house and my mother was in the bathroom. My dad was sitting in the living room reading the paper and listening to the radio. My mother started yelling.

“Oh God! I think I swallowed a safety pin!”

Judy ran to the bathroom and my mother was putting her finger down her throat to try to make herself throw up.

Mother said: “I had a safety pin in my mouth. I was trying to pin my blouse where the button is missing. I think I swallowed it.”

Judy said: “Well Annie, was it open or closed?”

Mother said: “Oh Lord, I don’t know!”

I was just a little kid and all this scared me. My dad looked up from his paper for a few seconds and just went back to reading. I am having images in my head about an open safety pin in your stomach poking holes as it goes down until it finally gets stuck real good. Then I am trying to imagine what it is going to take to get it out. Can they put something down your throat or will they have to cut your stomach open?

Judy said: “Russell, don’t you think we need to take her to the hospital?”

My dad said: “I don’t know.”

Judy said to my mother: “Do you feel anything, any pain in your throat?”

My mother said: “I don’t know. I can’t tell.”

Then my mother said: “Oh, here it is on the floor.”