In the spirit of the season Ammo Grrrll reflects on VALUES AND HOW WE GET THEM. She writes:
I remember the scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen meets Annie’s parents, who are ridiculous parodies of Jew-hating uptight gentiles, though to the best of my recollection neither of them was a college president. The Woody character imagines their viewing him with payess (sidecurls) and big Ultra-Orthodox headwear. Before the visit, Annie says that the biggest sin in her family was being loud. Woody responds that the biggest sin in his family was buying retail. It’s a reasonably funny line, contrived stereotypes notwithstanding.
Remembering the movie triggered in me a thought or two about how our family’s values are inculcated into us as children. Mother valued above all love of God, courage, honesty (but never tattling!), human kindness, and THRIFT. Daddy, whose beloved 21-year-old brother gave his life for his country in WW2, valued patriotism, independence, and honesty in business.
Mother’s thrift was legendary. Bill Bryson, in his great book about growing up in the ’50s, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, claimed his mother served only leftovers and the original meal had never been found. Mama wasn’t quite that bad, but nothing was ever wasted. She cut the bottoms out of flour and sugar sacks to get every individual granule into her canisters. Anything that was “almost going bad” in the fridge went into very eclectic stews and soups – limp celery, sad vegetables as far past prime as most of the Senate, leftover meats that were 15 minutes from “turning.” Yum!
She created immune systems that should have been the envy of the medical world. Here’s a fact: I never missed one day of school from kindergarten through graduation from high school for illness! (I did take one “mental health day” where I faked illness in order to read Gone With the Wind in one day, all 1,037 pages.)
Naturally, she only used frozen concentrate Orange Juice. In fact, she would add FOUR cans of water instead of three to make it go further. She watered down any condiments that were almost gone. Beware of Lake Mustard when you pour it on that hot dog! We had a margarine that came in a gross looking white plastic bag with a little bubble of dye in it and we had to squish the bag until it turned yellow. Until I got married I had only tasted Miracle Whip and Velveeta. I still think there is no Grilled Cheese Sammich like one made with Velveeta, whatever the heck it actually is.
When Mama was 89, we moved to Arizona. On her first visit she saw my brand new Keurig coffee system. She thought she had died and gone to Heaven. Can you guess what she did after she made her first Keurig cup? (I bet you can…) She tried to use the used Keurig cup a second time. Alas, the Keurig people had anticipated that and no deal. I could go on for the whole column about Thrift. But let’s move on to Honesty.
When I was three, Daddy got his first pharmacy job in the tiny town of Sisseton, South Dakota. For about a year, the little two-bedroom, one-bathroom house they rented had only window shades, not curtains in the bedrooms. One fine day when I was about 5, we drove to Penney’s to buy something she called “sheers” for the two little windows in the two little bedrooms. I believe they were just under $1.00 apiece. She needed four sheers for each bedroom but could only afford to start with one bedroom.
When we got home, she discovered – because the fabric was so sheer and flimsy — that the saleslady had accidentally put eight of them in her bag! Being a kid, I thought it was a gift from Heaven and it would make her happy! But, alas, SHE said it was a mistake, and wrong to take advantage of it. So back we went to the store to return them.
Even though I was very young, it taught me a lesson I cannot forget, try as I may: Don’t steal. Penney’s would never have missed those sheers until Inventory and they probably would have survived. But that wasn’t the point. We hadn’t paid for them; they did not belong to us.
“Even if your theft will never be discovered,” Mother said, “God will know and it will corrupt your soul. Every single thing we do as human beings is habitual. You don’t want to become a habitual thief.”
Like most of you, I bet, I have on occasion brought a mistake in a store’s favor to the attention of the clerks. They look at you like you are deranged and then eventually manage to say, “Gee, thank you for your honesty.” Believe me, I am as imperfect and disappointing as the next person. I would love to “get away with it,” really I would, but I am simply incapable of it. Mama lives in my head even worse than Donald Trump lives in the heads of leftists.
It horrifies me to think that we have tens of thousands of yutes in this country who carjack at great peril to the owner of the car and people of all colors who loot Target together as a family or shoplift $950 a day as a business. The worst part of that is not only do they not consider it “stealing,” they will swear it is an entitlement for whatever bogus word salad is current — reparations, food insecurity, or just stickin’ it to The Man. What happens when millions of people learn THIS gibberish at their mothers’ knees, instead of that stealing is wrong? I mean, out of the 613 Commandments in the Torah, stealing made the Top Ten!
Not that Mama was a plaster saint. Whereas she abhorred lying, she was not above a smidgen of deception to AVOID outright lying. She said all babies are NOT cute! They are precious, yes, but not all cute. When she would say “Oh, what a SWEET baby,” I knew she didn’t think that infant met her tough standards for “cuteness.”
Like most women of the ’50s, she only rarely (when she got a substitute teaching job for $18/day) had any money of her own. Daddy gave her household money, of course, and she could prise a few dollars for herself out of that. She would buy a new blouse or housedress (such things cost a few dollars at most in those days), and she would put it in the box under the bed for a couple of months. Then, when she would wear the item and Daddy would ask, “Is that new?,” she could say, “Oh goodness, this old thing? I’ve had it for months.”
The lesson I took from that was not that you should hide new clothes from your husband – in the unlikely event that mine would even notice a different t-shirt or pair of jeans – but that you should HAVE YOUR OWN FLIPPIN’ MONEY!
I want to add – because I think it’s important — that this little country girl from Astoria, South Dakota, born in 1921, also did not have a racist bone in her body. When Daddy was stationed in Memphis for some Naval Training, she got a job in a department store. All the secretaries and clerks ate their bag lunches together in the employee breakroom. Far from the ladies, the elderly black janitor ate his lunch alone. Mother once tried to sit across from him to chat and the Southern women freaked out entirely. She could have withstood that, but the poor gentleman himself said, “Miss Dottie, I appreciate your friendliness. But you are not from around here and you could get me killed.” She went back where she “belonged.”
It is a tragic fact that hate can be taught and has been taught to dreadful effect. But, clearly, a virulent new strain of racial hatred has been unloosed on whites, Asians, and Jews. Under cover of the absurd claim that, “It isn’t really racism unless it’s against black people,” this hate has been stoked for a very long time now. It was amplified greatly during the Obama disaster. Now, in the wake of the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, it has not just reared its ugly head, but its whole ugly putrescent body, and is strutting around proudly with few adverse consequences. The ugly poison of racist hate isn’t any less toxic just because there are new targets. Or in the case of Jew-hatred, old hatreds wrapped in new rhetoric.
But as we are reminded of deadly poisons, let me end on a more “up” note right before Christmas. A well-respected commenter here who feels more comfortable using a “nom de plume” (Eddie McTier) has just released his first novel, called Ant Poison Revenge! He asked me to read it before he sent it out into the world. I begged off on the basis of being crazy busy. But, like we have been told about so many brave feminists, “he persisted.”
He sent it by PDF and I read it all in one go, waaaay past my bedtime! In my opinion, it is more a multilayered love story even than a rip-snortin’, page-turnin’ exciting mystery. Which it also is. Why a love story? Without giving away any spoilers, it is about an all-consuming loving marriage, a love of our country how it used to be everywhere and still is in Eddie McTier’s red state, a love for truth and individualism and a hate for Groupthink. Oh, it’s also a cleverly disguised allegory involving – of all things! – fire ants. I can say no more. Except that the cover art alone is worth the price of the book!
It is a delightful read, literally like nothing I have ever read. And I have read a LOT. Buy it autographed at CC3 in Mesa or in book form or Kindle form NOW from Amazon.