Introduction
Rory and Ita are the parents of writer Roddy Doyle and as I read his book about them I'm inspired to think and write about my own mother and father. Sometimes I feel they may have been alerted.
Doug: He's opened his memory box.
Edith: Our lives seem an open book to him now.
Doug: He's thinking about you today.
Edith: I'll try to keep an open mind.
* * * * *
Hockey Gloves from Santa
In Doyle's Rory and Ita I read that Ita recalled a scheme in public school that provided needy students with "free milk, little cartons of milk." It was means-tested and she was never given any.
When I was in kindergarten I was given a small bottle of white milk on a regular basis and on rare occasions chocolate milk. It came in short sturdy bottles with a cardboard cap and they were difficult for me to open because I chewed my nails, a habit discouraged by my mother - unsuccessfully - for a decade or more. Every other student received milk too and we supplemented the cost by bringing a quarter to school on occasion, a quarter my mother would have found hard to come by in the early 1950s.
Sneaky Pete, I was. One day I hid the quarter - my ticket to heaven, or at least to the candy counter at Wettlaufer's General Store - upon a flat stone in the middle of a shallow creek on my way to catch a ride to school. I lived in Burgessville at the time and was transported five miles to Norwich by car. The car routinely picked me up at Wettlaufer's, a temple of temptation for any five-year old, and on that day, once in the car, I was asked by schoolmates Linda and Grant Lee if I'd remembered my quarter. I said something in return that fit in with my Sneaky Pete routine. At school the teacher asked me the same thing and likely made a phone call to my mother while 'nap time' was in progress.
Back home I'm sure I was grilled up one side and down the other by my mother, whose tight control on the house hold finances was almost absolute. It wasn't long, however, before I was standing in the middle of the creek looking for my quarter. I felt some elation when I retrieved the coin but other memories related to my crime have long been forgotten. Happily for me, I do not recall any other time I tempted fate by stealing coins from my mother. But brown sugar and honey? That's another story.
Ita also recalls something else that activated my memory cells. When Christmas came around her father had no idea what to get her.
[Pg. 39, Rory and Ita]
It made me think of two related matters: My father was much the same. He left money on the kitchen counter and let mother handle the Christmas shopping. And my mother was a star. She could shop for all her children and never miss the mark.
["Mother had a good eye. Here she wears one of two
lovely Nehru jackets* and visits with her brother"]
I don't recall many Christmas gifts I received from her, or Santa, over the years but two photographs help my memory.
["Reach for the sky or I'll plug ya"]
I shot down many a bad man while wearing twin silver Lone Rider pistols. The perfect gift for a boy who never walked anywhere if he could get there by running.
["Whoa! These are great!" Christmas 1965]
And I scored several goals and harassed many opposing players while wearing my first-ever new pair of leather hockey gloves. The house-coat came from mother as well but it was the hockey gloves that made the day. Almost 50 Christmases have come and gone since that special one, and I cannot recall any other presents that rang my bell as loudly.
The beat up hockey gloves, though repaired several times, eventually went out of style and today reside on a dusty upper shelf in my workshop. Dusty but not forgotten, they survive as a link to a selfless woman who often did without for the sake of her kids.
["Old-style and dusty, like me"]
Well done, Mother Dear.
Photos by GH
* I bought the Nehru jackets In London for my own use in 1968, as a first-year university student. They went out of style rather quickly, in my opinion, but when my mother found them gathering dust in my closet in the 1970s she grabbed them, and wore them on special occasions. She certainly looked better in them than I did.
More Doug and Edith (2)
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