My mother, Miss Sentimentality

 

 

The Pegster with two truly prized possessions

To know my mother is to love her.  A modern day saint, she gives and gives and expects nothing in return. When Paul and I go away for the weekend, she picks the kids up from school the day before, so I have time to get packed, keeps them and the dog while we’re gone, and, I am not making this up, has a HOT DINNER waiting for us on Sunday when we return, because, and I quote,”There’s nothing worse than having to run to the grocery store first thing.” Someday I will write an entire column, perhaps a book, on her good qualities. But not today.

 

Today I will expose to the world the single flaw of Peggy Rogers, or “the Pegster,” as we affectionately call her.  Here goes: despite her many praiseworthy qualities, this woman has no use for sentimental possessions or keepsakes–her own or anyone else’s.  Isn’t this a good thing?, I hear you asking.   Aren’t the righteous instructed to eschew earthly riches, and focus on building up our treasures in heaven? Yes, gentle reader, we are. But, I would counter, in the immortal words of Socrates: “Nothing to excess.”  (Don’t be too impressed. This and “Know thyself” are the only quotes I know by Socrates. And the second one may have been Plato. But I digress.)

My father will back me up on this.  The story goes that after my parents married, my mother moved into his house in Florida, and, in computer parlance, set about erasing his hard drive.  Before the bags were unpacked from the honeymoon, my mother attacked, ridding the closet of his hunting camoflauge (Those awful old things? I can hear her asking),  his polyester yellow pants (O.K., I guess I can forgive her this one), and his US Navy uniform (Now when are you ever going to wear that again? she would have queried, adding for emphasis her ‘disgusted’ laugh which, described brilliantly by my brother, is the raspberry sound followed by a quick expulsion of air, as if someone has just given her the Heimlich maneuver).  

Fortunately, my father, being a gentle soul, forgave his new bride, and over the years has come to accept these bursts of overzealous housecleaning.

But my father has not been her only victim. When I was young, I prized more than anything my collection of stuffed animals.  I kept a roster of them, complete with their full names and birthdays. At its peak, the collection boasted over 100 stuffed toys.  I had a running contest going with my best friend, Alice Leinbach, who lived across the street.  I remember a particularly fruitful vacation to Pittsburgh, that I took with my great aunt when I was about 10. Aunt Peg, for whom my mother was named, was a big softy, and had bought me seven (count ‘em) new stuffed animals.  I was so excited that I called Alice, long distance, to brag. “104!” I began our conversation. “Yes,” she countered, “but those three felt butterfly refrigerator magnets you have don’t count!” 

You can imagine my horror when I returned home to Florida to find that twelve of my animals had gone missing in my absence.

“Where is Pinky Bear?” I shrieked. “And Blue Morgan?”

“Oh, those old things?” my mother countered. “Marie must have thrown them out when she was here.”

Marie was our housekeeper, who visited once a week, and will go down in history as the world’s most joyful woman. Absolutely everything she said was followed by a long string of barely audible laughter. “Hi there, Miss Betsy! Ksh sh sh sh sh sh sh!” she would greet me. “Just moppin’ the floor here! Ksh sh sh sh sh sh!”  For Marie, exposure to someone like Jerry Seinfeld would have been fatal.

Anyhow, whenever one of our toys would turn up missing, it was poor Marie who took the blame.  It seemed odd, even to our young minds, that this kindly soul would take it upon herself to sort through our prized possessions and throw things out willy-nilly. Still, Pegster’s nefarious practice of making Marie the scapegoat went undetected for years, until one day my brother John caught the Pegster dragging his rock tumbling and wood-burning kits out to the trash pile.

A few weeks back, I dropped by my parents’ house for a visit.  “Stay out of the way!” my father greeted me. “She’s on a rampage!” I peeked around the corner to see my mother rummaging through large stacks of books.  “Aren’t you going to stop her?” I asked.  “Last time she threw away your wedding album!”  This, in truth, had been a mistake, because the album had been in a mismarked box.  My dad shrugged resignedly, knowing that you just don’t mess with certain forces of nature.

Flash forward to last weekend, when I was volunteering, as I do every few weeks, at the library’s used bookstore, which stocks its shelves with donations from the community.  When ringing up a customer, I flipped open the front cover of a charming book on C.S. Lewis’ England, to find the price. Instead, I found the inscription, in my aunt’s very distinctive handwriting, “To Jack, Happy Father’s Day, 1975!”  Twenty minutes later, another customer bought a lovely coffee table book–inscribed with the date and place in my late grandfather’s architectural script, “Hillcreek Farm, 1980.”  I spent the remainder of my three-hour shift frantically combing the shelves, convinced I would find the family bible or my baby book on sale for $1.50.

I guess, in the grand scheme of things, that if you’re only going to have one flaw, anti-sentimentality is a pretty good one to have. And in the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that in my case, the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree.  True confession: I don’t actually ever read the sappy pre-printed poems in greeting cards (If I must open them in front of others, I just unfold the card, pause for the appropriate amount of time while I pretend to read, and then say, “Ahh. How sweet.”). On more than one occasion, I have been confronted by my daughter, teary-eyed, holding a wadded up item of her clothing which I had failed to sufficiently bury in the trash bin.  But, honestly, when was she ever going to wear that old thing again?

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