MY MOTHER HAD a few rules for living, one or two of which I still call into play on a daily basis. Others are those I have heard other mothers repeat, like not wearing white after Labor Day and how it’s time then, too, to put away the seersucker. But I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about the big stuff, the important stuff, the real stuff of life.
I was reminded of one of her better bromides the other night when I was caught by my daughter as I stood shouting into the land line. My daughter seemed alarmed, checking in on me amid my first eruption. I think what I had bellowed into the receiver was “Are you drunk?”
From downstairs came the plaintive call of a confused teenage girl.
“Mom, who are you talking to?”
I was too busy screaming at the caller to answer my child, a condition that can only be achieved under certain, distinct circumstances, like being solicited on the phone by Callista Gingrich.
I’m pretty sure my next eruptive demand was “You’ve read it? Have you actually read it? I mean really read it?”
This last outburst was in response to Callista’s pre-recorded impassioned claim about something being in the Constitution that is not, in fact, in the Constitution. I’m pretty sure that freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly and petitioning the government are all crammed into that first amendment, but not the assurance that history be taught in the schools to reflect the ever-present role of God in the hearts and minds of the founding fathers.
I was about to hurl some spicier invective when I remembered my mother and her sayings, and suddenly the world seemed calm again, and the Constitution seemed safe again, and Callista was reduced to the blip she is on history’s timeline.
“Never trust a woman whose hair doesn’t move,” my mother once warned me after a similar dealing with a similar woman from another time and place. I was about my daughter’s age when this message was delivered, and while I’ve amended that rule to exclude my black friends, butch friends and anyone who chooses or needs to be closely shorn, it has served me well before. It served me well this recent night, and I managed to get off the phone unharmed, walk downstairs to my daughter, sit and begin a conversation with her by saying, “Honey, I’ve got a pretty good rule of life I’ve been meaning to share with you.”
