Happy Birfday

My maternal grandmother turned 90 in 1998, and shortly thereafter I decided I needed to go visit her and my aunts and get as much of a family history on tape as possible. I recorded 6 hours of sitting around with them, laughing our heads off as my aunts remembered story after story once the layers of the years came peeling off. I'll always be grateful I did this, and I will be transferring the tapes to digital this week and maybe stick a story or two up here. One thing I've always said: everyone should have the chance to hear my Aunt Pat talk at least once before they die. Seriously. I know of no other person who can stretch the name "Bob" into 9 syllables. This is the woman who when my friend Ryan said "you have an accent like the Kennedys" replied with "what accent?" And of course her smoking 9 cartons of smokes every day since 1955 only makes it funnier.

Remembering my mother as much as I do along with hearing her stories of growing up et al from my aunts, I do know from where I got my sense of humor, my kinda whimsical personality. I am not a serious man as my father, I have no sense of gravitas as he or my older brother has. Although as I've said before my mother dispatched the daily discipline throughout the house, unlike when my father walked into a room nobody said "alright, mom's here, everybody get serious." I would imagine I'm like my mother in that respect; nobody sees me coming and thinks "okay okay, Xmastime's coming, I better get my shit together." One time after some church event (pancake supper, I'm sure) two of my mother's friends got into a heated argument. I was prolly 7 or 8, I had never witnessed two adults screaming in each other's face before. It was, in a word, fascinating; I'm surprised I didn't grab some pancakes and pull up a chair for the show. They're yelling, inches from each other, tears and mascara running, when all of a sudden my mother, without saying a word, slides in between them, holding up a hairbrush as if a microphone. Startled, one of them says "what the hell are you doing?" My mother simply says "I'm Barbara Walters." The timing and absurdity of it cracked both women up, they saw the silliness of their fighting and everybody hugged everybody, crisis averted. I can see a lot of myself in my mother in that scene. And listening to these tapes I made, I also know from where I inherited the ability to repeat a story 7 times even as I'm telling it the first time. Hmm.

One small memory I've always kept for some reason, even if it was only a small moment, was one afternoon after Sunday dinner. I might've been oh, 10 or 11. I was doing the dishes by myself, the kitchen empty except for my mother sitting at the kitchen table, just relaxing looking out the window that was in front of me over the sink. I'm scrubbing dishes etc, neither of us is saying anything. I quietly start humming something, just kinda bopping my head ba-dum-bum-bum-bum-ba-dum-bum-bum-bum, just kinda bebopping for no reason. This shortly changed from humming to to pshaw-ing out loud the same rhythm with my lips, I had forgotten my mother was sitting there and was getting noisier. Then from outta the water in the sink I happened to pick up some brush, shaped like a paintbrush, as for putting a glaze on a barbecue I guess. I'm bebopping out loud, bopping my head, rinsing the brush off and without breaking rhythm all of a sudden thrust the brush to the window and give it a few slaps, as if I was painting on a large canvas, my slaps with the bursh accompanied by even louder scatting A BOW-BOW-BOW! All of a sudden I hear my mother behind me cracking up, I turn around and she's laughing her head off. "Oh god, Greg," she laughed, "you're too funny." Looking back I don't know if it was that funny, and it's a tiny moment in just any ordinary day, but I'll always remember it.