KATHARINA: Where did you study all this goodly speech?
PETRUCHIO: It is extempore, from my mother-wit.
KATHARINA: A witty mother! witless else her son.
TAMING OF THE SHREW
Would you like to conduct better convo with your relatives?
Who wouldn’t! Conversations with a parent can be so fraught.
And here’s one reason why: Mothers make up words all the time. How do they do that? And how can you keep up with them? Either they get them brand new hot-off-the-pusses of their babies and keep a journal, or they stole them or I don’t know where they got them.
For instance, my mom always hated us kids sitting around doing nothing. “Why are you sitting around like a bump on a log? Good gravy! Criminently!”
Right there are three things at least I never understood. No wonder I was raised up so screwed up. Years before drones, heat-seeking mom missiles left me under a barrage of zingers.
Fathers are more about mixed messages. “I won’t die until I see you’re successful,” Dad would say. So wait, meaning that if I become a success, then you will die? Nooooo!
“You just gotta have that old confidence!” went another well-wrought Da-da-ism. Well, um then, how do you get that?
No idea. By contrast, mothers can lead you into the most embarrassing conversations ever.
THE TYPING TEST
During one of our best, I was smack in the middle of a typing test in New York City, in the kind of yellowing midtown employment office where 80 wpm w/14 mistakes is kinda lousy, but in the late 1980s could still get me “temp work.”
I grabbed an empty desk and gave a call back to Detroit while waiting for the woman doing the scoring to return.
“A typing test?” Mom asked right away.
“Yeah, I know,” I said, affecting dullness, my go-to affect when feeling attacked. “A typing test. I’m 35. At 35 a typing test.”
“Did you tell them you were a writer?”
“Yes, I said to the lady: ‘I should be writing the copy for this. This Royal Typing test? Not taking it, but writing it, ha ha.’”
“I just read an article —“
[I cut this part for many reasons. Moving now to later in our conversation.]
“You sound depressed.”
“Well, it’s just that, I’m already at the age pro football players retire.”
“So? You’re not married, you don’t have another mouth to feed.”
“I know. I mean I should be, but I’m not. Well at least I’m not divorced yet.”
“You’re still seeing Michelle?”
“Yes, I told her last night: I’m 35, I should be getting my kids to bed. Instead I’m still trying to get you to bed. But no, we’re not going together…no.”
“And the other one?”
“Her?”
“If that’s the one. I don’t know.”
“The other one took me to a dance concert. Well, it began as dance and then came a light show and there was some singing and a film.”
“Whaaaaa?”
“One of those new wave variety deals. But one of the dancers had a broken leg, and the singer had laryngitis, so the dancer had to sing and the singer had to dance.”
“Oy fa voy.”
“It was okay. The film was good.”
“Now what about Melissa?”
“No, we’re not, no.”
“You’re not seeing her anymore?”
“No. Because her life is a mess right now, she says. I said what woman’s life isn’t a mess right now. With everything that’s going on.”
“Wasn’t there another woman visiting from Boston?”
“Her? No, we’re not, no. She told me she’s been having some bad luck with her Ouija Board lately.”
“You don’t say!”
“Or something. She’s been seeing this mystifying oracle, I don’t know, it’s none of my business. I said, ‘Who has time for two-minute mysteries, baby: love me.’”
“You remember what I told you?”
“That moose meat rivals the best beef?”
“What?”
“I know – love is just peer pressure when you really need it the most.”
“Your father and I would like to see you…you know.”
“Sure I wanna be married; it would improve my social life! That’s like asking why do I trample on the environment? Because-the-guy-before-me-did! That’s why anyone gets married.”
“Well, your father and I –”
“No, I do. I wanna make my kids laugh. I want them to make me laugh.”
“So?”
“So everybody I know is either getting married, breaking up, having a baby, or dying.”
“Welcome to my world, that’s called being an adult.”
“Thank you! I wondered what that was supposed to feel like.”
“And wasn’t there one from last summer?”
“Her? No, we’re not, no.”
“Mindy?”
“I mean, we were, but now we’re not.”
“Not even seeing each other?”
“But that’s the great thing about voice mail: you don’t wanna see each other but you can pretend to still be talking. She leaves voicemails she says, just to put her voice into my energy field. ”
“Go on!”
“It’s like getting messages from another dimension.”
“Better than a poke in the eye from a sharp stick.”
“The last time with her she said she had to laugh to keep from throwing up.”
“Go on!”
“Remember the one who told me that before I met her I could barely butter bread?”
“No.”
“She told me for a guy who claimed to have his head in the game, I sure had it up my ass half the time.”
“The therapist?”
“Like, I couldn’t even look at her anymore without feeling I was sexually harassing her. So no, we’re not, no.”
“So go no.”
“So now you know.”
“Good gravy. Well, thanks for calling. You could call more often.”
“I’ve been trying to. You’re never home. Get your answering machine fixed, we’ll talk. Bye Mom – ”
[CLICK]
Decent convo but I get no closure because my mother just hangs up. She got that from her father, a member of Generation I from a time when a phone call wasn’t anything like a real conversation consisting of greetings and farewells. A phone call back then was an event! Witness this 1904 scene from the MGM musical, MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS *
Years before “Let the machine get it.” Before phone conversations became interruptions because a call bothers you in the middle of everything going on right then in your life. (Mostly texting.)
Five Questions For Folk Journalists
Do you have conversations with family members face-to-face?
How long do these exchanges last?
What would improve your conversations?
At what age did you have your best conversations with a parent?
Did your father or mother have any “catch phrases” passed on to your siblings?
Activity
Want more fun connection with beloved family members? Try some phrases/trite truisms a parent particularly pulled out for no rhyme and very little reason. (References from the ’50s and ’60s are all fair use, public domain and publically-domiciled cultural fodder.)
“Hey, there she is, the People’s Choice!”*
“Hello Old Timer!”
“Good Gravy!”
“It’s all grist for the mill.”
“Christ on a bicycle!”
Bonus! Another Excellent Mom Convo
Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson recalled a childhood conversation with his mother. She wanted him to understand that becoming a world-class athlete was not as far-fetched as he thought. She said Russell should ask himself: “Why not me?”
* In MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, starring Judy Garland and written by Irving Brecher and Fred Finkelhoffe, a phone call took an appointment to arrange. And a family to listen in.
There’s less cleaning up afterwards.
Kurt Vonnegut on why he preferred laughing to crying.