The Boxer

My friend Abby asked me a question.

"Where do you get your sense of humor?"

As I always do, I gave proper credit to my parents. Lucky to have parents with different but exceptionally keen senses of humor, I took elements of both and made it my own

The quick sarcasm is straight from my father. Like a precious timepiece passed down from father to son, I can only hope that my son will wield that same razor wit that his grandfather still shows on occasion to this day.

While my mother and I share commonalities in what we find funny, (We both love practical jokes. We hold seeing people we care about make an ass of themselves in highest regard) it is the context more than the content that my mom passed on to me.

Like so many in my life, I knew my mom would make for an entertaining subject. I knew the myriad of material she has provided could be told in a story. Truth be told she could be her own blog. She could be her own internet. I struggled with ideas. I'd write and delete, write and delete, write and delete.

Stuck and with father's day approaching I thought maybe my dad would be an easier story to tell.

My son loves to hear music. In his monosyllabic squeaks and squeals, he has learned to request songs that I am happy to oblige. "You Don't Mess Around With Jim" is translated to "Dee-dee-dee." "Bad Bad Leroy Brown" is "BadBad." He requested these two songs ad-nauseum and I was thrilled when I caught him bobbing his over-sized head to "The Boxer" by Simon and Garfunkel. The request for "Lie-la-Lie" quickly became part of his repertoire. As I sang along with my son, I became conscious that maybe this song would serve as a nice backdrop for a post about my dad. After countless requests by my son, I realized that despite the obvious gender differences, the song summed up My mother perfectly.

All lies in jest,
still a man hears what he wants to hear
and disregards the rest

My mom operates among her own rules. She is fully aware of the expectations society has for a 72 year old grandmother and she plays along when those norms fit into her way of doing things and to hell with it if they don't.

She considers herself Protestant and I truly believe it's because The Catholics make you shake hands and show a sign of Peace.

Prior to going to Mass with me she will sigh and say "I hate the hand shaking. I don't wanna shake some stranger's hand."
"Don't then."
"Yeah well..."

Her voice will trail off as she imagines a world where she can snub a well-meaning stranger.

oh no thank you, she will say, I don't know you and don't want to shake your hand.


She is genetically incapable of getting names of movies and celebrities and pop culture icons. Compounding this, she speaks freely without the slightest bit of hesitation, doubt, or self-awareness. Most people would make an effort to get these things right so the listener might have some form of comprehension and an ability to play an active role in the conversation. Not her. She sees it as your job to keep up and if not, she is fine leaving you behind.

She refers to the revolutionary social media site as "spacepage."

She once held a fifteen minute discussion on the "raw deal" that infamous cult leader Ted Manson, got from his sentence of life in prison. Ted Manson, who as near as we can figure, is a mesh of Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and possibly Ted Danson.

"Oh you know what I meant" is her constant and immediate response. Whether you did or not is of no consequence to her.

Once, my niece Christina brought her friend camping. I was telling a story about a euchre tournament in which I was the only participant with all my teeth. Remembering only after I finished the story that the friend Christina brought did not, in fact, have all her teeth. A fact I wished I had remembered as I sat awkwardly staring at the sizeable hole in the now half agape mouth of the teenage girl I had just mortified. Luckily my mom was there to bail me out:
"YOU'RE SO STUPID!"
She's right.
I was.
I am.


Laying Low
seeking out the poorer quarters
where the ragged people go
looking for the places only they would know.

She has known ragged people. She has married a couple of them. Others she has called friends and family. Her heart goes out to the ragged people and she will often open her arms and her home to them long after everyone else has understandably stopped doing so.

A perfect example of this is a cousin she routinely visits in prison. This is a man who has spent most of his adult life incarcerated and long ago established his role as a skeleton in the furthest recesses of our family closet. Knowing how I would feel, she kept secret the fact that she was going to a maximum security prison on a regular basis to see her felonious cousin who was serving a life sentence.

She mentioned him in a purposefully nonchalant manner and as I always do when she tries this shit, I jumped all over it.

"Wait...what cousin?"
"Oh my cousin that has been in prison since before you were born."
"Uh, the guy who kidnapped and raped that woman?"
"Yeah him."
"He kidnapped and raped someone."
"Yeah, he did. That was wrong."
"Jesus Christ mom. What are you doing?"
"Well he's an old man now."
"Yeah. he's old. He's an old kidnapper and an old rapist!"

The conversation ended. She knew I'd never be OK with her going and I knew she'd still go.

Doubtless it was this kindness to the ragged people that served as the background for what I often refer to as a "lost classic" in our family history.

My mom worked for a time at The Veterans Hospital in Battle Creek. She had a soft spot for Veterans and those who ended up here were often lost souls who had no one or no where to shelter them.

I was probably ten when I came home and noticed an old, green, Ford in our drive way. An older man sat in the car and it was clear to me even then that something was not right with this man. I double timed it to my neighbor's house and alerted his father. My friend's dad called my dad at work and the two talked. My neighbor's dad walked over and confronted the man and he left. The man, as it turns out, was a mental patient from the VA that had somehow gotten our address and had come to our house in search of my mom. My dad left work and informed me that the man, John, had been caught and was back in custody. Being the sensitive cat that he was, my dad saw fit to cue me in to everything that was going on, terrifying me in the process.

"This guy has a thing for your mother. He told the cops he had murdered her. They don't know how he got out or how the hell he knows where we live but he did."

This would be a lot for anyone to take in. For a ten year old prone to worry, it was earth shattering. I began to shake and my dad noticed. The notion of reassuring me that "this was a terrible mistake but that it was OK and would absolutely NEVER happen again as this man was an obvious danger and they would lock him up and throw away the key" might have been one route my dad could have taken in calming his son who sat trembling in fear beside him. My father decided on a different course of action

"Don't worry. If he comes back, I'll kill the motherfucker."

Oh.
Good.
Nothing to worry about then.

What the fuck?
If?
I wanted no part of if.
If is no good.
If is bad.
I was pretty sure that If he comes back and If he killed said motherfucker, this presents a whole new array of problems. Chief among them being the fact that my father will then go to prison for killing this man. The math of saving one parent and losing another was not something my dad considered.

Needless to say, my father exacerbated the situation immensely and by the time my mom made it home from work, she had a quivering ten year old on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I don't remember what my mom said to make it better but whatever it was, it was obviously effective.

Last year, some two and a half decades later, I was reminded of this story in some vague and foggy way and called my mom for clarity

"Hey ma, remember that time that guy who was a patient and he came to our house..." I trailed off as I tried to piece together the faded memory.

"Huh? No, i don't know what you're talking about"

"Yeah, you know, that guy....John something or other, I think he said he killed you or something."

The lightbulb flickered for a brief second and illuminated my mom's memory as if she was trying to recall the details of some long passed vacation instead of a story in which a psychotic man stalked our family

"Oh yeah...John, yeah John. That's right, geez I forgot about that. Yeah...what about him."

"Oh Nothing, I just couldn't remember what happened with that."

"Yeah, he was crazy and I guess he liked me. I was nice to him or something, I don't really remember.

I immediately cracked up at the absurdity.

"What?"

I spoke through halting laughter, my voice cracking

"Jesus Christ what is wrong with us?"

I reasoned to her that any other family might never recover from this and at the very least would still be in therapy over it and here we were fumbling and foggy and trying like hell to rememeber the details.

She then laughed too and added "Yeah...well...whatever. It turned out fine."


In The clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders of every glove
that laid him down or cut him til he cried out,
in his anger and his shame
I am leaving. I am leaving.
But the fighter still remains.


I admit our reaction to the story of John is abnormal. More importantly, it gets to the crux of something else. More than any other trait of her character it is my mom's resilience that stands out above everything else. It is easily the most important lesson she has ever taught me. I pride myself on my ability to bounce back and this comes straight from my mother. People often measure "tough" in the punches you throw when in reality, it's the ability to take those punches that serve as the true measure of toughness. I don't know a tougher soul than my mother. It is that toughness that helps me see the humor in the most bizzare and sometimes frightening situations. She has more to do with the common theme running through these stories then she realizes. She, like anyone who has spent seventy plus years on this planet, has seen any number of life's pitfalls and tragedies. She has stood at the hospital bedside of four children and the graveside of one. She has experienced great joy but also pain in immeasurable quantities. Through all of it she remains resilient as hell and often does so by laughing with and laughing at those things that would crush others under its weight. She has taught my brothers and sister and I that to get through life, sometimes it's better to laugh at it.
And we are all better for it.