Calling upon appropriate authority

In which our Hero records a few moments for his mother

My parents got a thank-you card from a wedding last year, of my cousin Boney to his high school sweetheart after 10 years of perpetual dating. I can’t say I was a fan of the relationship back then, I always felt that his parents were absurdly permissive, but I recognize that I’ve been a stodgy old man since I was a child. That said, they’re good together in all that I’ve seen, and somehow they’ve managed to last this long, so good for them.

The card was unexpected because thank-you cards seem to take forever in any case, but also, because of the author. Thank-you cards are something of an emotion based courtesy that frankly tends to cruise just a little beyond the sensitivity of a typical male, and I say that *as* a male occasionally possessed of glimmers of awareness. Wedding thank-yous are almost always, in my experience, the work of the bride with possibly a signature from the groom.

But here was a card that was written by the groom, and addressed to his great-aunt-my-mother, saying thank you, not just for the wedding but for actual touch-points over the span of his life here, from when we took his family in as new immigrants for most of a year to things she did to help teach him while he was in school to just gratitude for being a significant part of the chain of causality that lead him to his wife.

I know my parents are both deeply touched by the thought and deed both. And me, I’m impressed. Not surprised, because I’ve known him long enough to know that there’s depth to him and affection in that depth, but impressed that he expressed it so earnestly. Nor does it hurt that making my mother happy is a great way to get into my good graces. Now I just have to figure out how to balance my irritation with his father (Hurting my mother is a great way to get onto my shit list) with my appreciation for the boy because it was simpler when I could think of the family as mostly black sheep.

It was good.

You know how everybody has varying degrees of latent fears that they carry through their lives. Some people won’t step on sewer grates, some people are afraid of trees falling. I’m not afraid of the sewer grates, though I avoid them if I have an alternative as a matter of risk management. On the other hand, I live in a constant cloud of fatalistic dread against the day that my mother gets arrested for “being harmless with poor judgement.”

I’ve mentioned before that she loves little kids and will charge in to interact with them any time, any place. Which is great at a family party. And horrifying when it’s a stranger’s kids at a grocery store. The kid doesn’t need to be verbal, she’ll talk to them, generally when they’re already upset and crying. Because you know that when their kid is melting down in a public place is the most likely place to find rational kids and parents who will be perfectly receptive to a strange old lady saying, “That’s it, if you keep crying then you’re coming home with me.”

That said, I guess people are socially conditioned to accept random interference with their children from strangers because my mother’s gotten no worse than uncomfortable (terrified is a kind of uncomfortable right?) looks. And time and changing conventions have moderated even her, in that I’ve mostly convinced her to ask permission before offering candy to random kids. But still she charges in, and still melting down children stop mid-sob to stare in utter confusion at this incomprehensible and impossible strange lady who can’t possibly get to take them away except that sometimes the rules change on little kids and maybe just possibly she might really mean it.

Children related by blood, however distantly, are not covered by legal niceties in which case my mother feels free to play, scold, meow at and feed candy to with no restraint, obligation to get permission through divine and temporal right. She is an old woman in the family and taking on the corona of supreme authority that our family concedes to our eldests. Frankly, despite having needed years to age into age, she’s always taken the free reign, terrorizing generations of children back to days before I was available to be the apple of her eye.

Her grand-nephews, Ice’s brood, are a trio of boys, one still crawly and the others finding their loud, confident and conflicting personalities. I’m just a touch reassured by the volume because they were a little too shy as a twosome and as much as I like the peace and quiet, too much reticence does not serve a little kid well. In any case, they squabble and when my mother is about, she wades in to brawl with them, calming, distracting and eventually, as necessary, threatening that whoever doesn’t behave has to come home with her.

Well, I guess they got the message. Not at the time, because that fight continued. But this week, my mother got a phone call that erupted into two furious little boys shouting over each other into the phone that the other one was not behaving and their great aunt needed to collect her prize.

I don’t know exactly how the matter was resolved. I was laughing too hard when my mother’s story got this far.