93 & Me

Today is a Very Important Day, for it marks the initial appearance 93 years ago of Small N. Allison.

At the exact second I sat down to begin this entry, Ralph Stanley’s haunting, high-lonesome tenor carried over my computer’s speakers as he keened his classic Mother’s Not Dead, She’s Only a’Sleepin’. 

Stop! It’s not time for that! For I have the great good fortune of having my own Small right over there, just spitting-distance away on the other side of the country, quite alive. 

One day, and I selfishly hope it’s a long way off (provided Ma is still enjoying life in the interim), I may indeed have to wail other bluegrass favorites like If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again, and Mama, What Does Heaven Look Like?, and of course I Have No Mother Now. The Appalachian hollers have produced a glut of dead-mother songs. (Dead fathers and dead babies abound, too.) But for now I am celebrating one living, witty, generous, affectionate, funny, increasingly feisty and, of course, small maternal unit.

Where to begin? For 93 years she’s resided here and there in the same northern Delaware town (if you don’t count the countless extended stays on the West Virginia farm while Dad was alive), never living more than a handful of minutes from her childhood abode. She’s a homebody, happiest when things around her—people, places, customs—are familiar. While she accepts (with some reservations) my interest in travel to faraway places, I don’t think she understands why anyone would want to do it.

She got an outstanding education at a local K–12 prep school (where I went 25 years later). We both found the social dynamics there to be deadly, even in our earliest years. I recall my seven-year-old classmate informing me, “My father makes more money than your father.” Ma has her own stories. During our entire thirteen-year imprisonment, neither of us was welcomed anywhere near the in-crowd of snobs and competitive jocks. Which turned out, of course, to be a good thing.

The similarities between our scholastic experiences end there. She was an A-student; I was in the “C section.” She was valedictorian of her graduating class and went on to Vassar; I didn’t even have a graduating class, having bailed for art school in Brooklyn after 11th grade.

I don’t know how it was during Ma’s tenure, but in mine there was an important lunchtime ritual. Four grades’ worth of students (125 or so) would crowd into the cafeteria. At the end of the meal we’d listen to the fearsome assistant headmaster—”Wicked Uncle Ernie,” a few of us called him, after the villain in the rock opera “Tommy”—read the day’s administrative announcements over the PA system. (Though I couldn’t stand him—he busted me literally every time I tried to sneak off the closed campus during high school—he was a dear friend of my parents.) Then he handed over the mic to a student for the most anticipated part: birthday greetings, always narrated by a different kid each day. It was a script that no one ever deviated from:

Today is [Pookie’s] birthday. We will all sing happy birthday to [her].

The room would then burst into song. Or, not so much. It was easy to rank the level of popularity of any given honoree, just by noting the loudness and enthusiasm of the crowd—as well as the number of singers—all of which increased in proportion to a kid’s social standing in the class.

I don’t know about you, Ma, but I’m so very glad I don’t have to go through all that again.

Other aspects of Ma’s childhood were happy overall. Not a day goes by when she doesn’t thank her lucky stars for having been adopted (at seven days) by adoring parents who went on to become, in my humble opinion, the best Grannie and Granddaddy ever.

Likewise, she is eternally grateful for her 54 years with my father. Here, they’re leaving for their honeymoon. She’s 21 and Dad is 24. See the older woman in the background? That’s sweet Emily Rugg from Guernsey, a survivor of the Titanic disaster who later worked for my grandparents.

93 Random Things You Should Know about Small

No, wait. Let’s do this instead:

9 Random Things You Should Know about Small

1. You might not guess from this picture that she is exceptionally proper and modest. She’ll have to be the one to give you the backstory on this photo, because for the life of me I can’t guess what that Halloween costume is supposed to represent. All I know is if I looked like that, I’d wear it too.
   
   These days, however, you’ll pretty much always find her garbed as you see in the Stella picture, above: a collared, button-down broadcloth shirt (white or pastel) tucked into wear-softened, slightly pilled high-waisted khaki cargo pants cinched by a brown leather belt.
   
2. Here’s something you’ll never see for yourself, so you’ll have to take my word for it, since the only ones to have borne witness are those she knows very, very well: When inspired, or her memory is otherwise jogged, she might spontaneously spout a verse of, say, some obscure 19th century English poem that she learned in high school. Likewise, with little provocation she’ll suddenly reel off, from memory, a bit of the libretto of one of her beloved Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. And of course anything from the Winnie-the-Pooh books, which she’s pretty much memorized, is a distinct possibility for an impromptu recitation.
   
3. She likes: meerkats (and most animals, really, excepting big hairy spiders); the New York Times Sunday puzzles (she’s a wizard); and reading cheerful novels with happy endings that she can escape into (what Grannie used to call “tea under the beeches” reading). Oh, and she’s impressive at the bridge table. (Not that I’d know anything about this. She’s tried now and again to teach me the game, but it never took.) She started young and until recently played with her buddies weekly or more for countless decades. But those pals are all gone now.
   
4. She dislikes: talking about anything negative. She often light-heartedly quotes her mother: “I count only the happy hours.”
   
5. A lifelong Republican, she has the humanity, decency and wisdom to have parted ways with her traditional party and condemned the actions of today’s right-wing figures. This is a big deal for her because she doesn’t like change. But she’s principled, and never for a moment considered voting for he-who-shall-not-be-named. Now we spend a small percentage of our daily phone check-in time lambasting the countless far-right perpetrators of evil.
   
6. Her organizational skills are astounding. She alphabetizes her spices. Her closets, drawers and cabinets are in perfect order. She’s got her obituary written and mortuary expenses paid off. But Heaven forbid a to-do list goes missing, else she’s lost. As with her mother before her, she wants things done and crossed off—weeks ahead of time, if possible.
   
   [Editor’s note: I can just see my daughters’ reactions to this last paragraph. “And you’re the same way!” Clearly I have been influenced to some minor extent by this proclivity of Ma’s (and Grannie’s). I, too, like to get stuff done ahead of time so I don’t feel rushed. To wit: I started writing this post over two weeks ahead its scheduled publication date. Which was wise, since I’ve spent every day since revising obsessively, wrapping up just in time.]
   
   Three months before we last went East Ma started planning the menus, asking me about this or that culinary possibility. (She still insists on preparing all our meals when we come see her.) After a few of these discussions, I couldn’t help but remind her that she still had a good 11½ weeks to work it out. But she hates having things up in the air, and the various dietary prohibitions and preferences of her guests confound and disorient her.
   
7. While she does indeed lead an orderly existence, I’d like to point out that she’s not fussy or uptight. Spill wine on her rug? “Oh, don’t worry. It’ll come out. If not, you’ll never even notice it.” And anything a visiting dog might get up to in her house is absolutely fine, for she believes pups can do no wrong.
   
8. For the last three years she has terribly missed her Stella (see photo above). Stella had been my Stella for three years (a “foster fail” that I wrote about here) until 2009 when I went to grad school in Vermont and couldn’t bring her. So Stella flew (solo) on the now-defunct Pet Airways from LA to Baltimore, where Mom picked her up and immediately set to spoiling her. “You can have her back any time,” she kept reassuring me, but we all knew that would never happen. By the end of their first week together they were besotted and inseparable. One night a few years later she saved Stella from an attack by a likely rabid raccoon in her backyard by hurling herself between the two of them. That worked out great. For Stella, anyway, who escaped unscathed. Ma on the other hand got a nasty chomp from the raccoon and subsequent rabies vaccines, all of it an experience she laughed off. Stella and Ma were best friends till the fall of 2018, when it was Stella’s time.
   
9. It’s not just her pets that Small would put her life at risk to protect. I strongly suspect that if any of the three of her kids were facing danger, she’d likewise throw her tiny little body in between. Which is a really bad idea. But there you have it. It’s what you do when you love your family beyond reason.

The Many Faces of Small

It occurs to me that, since first meeting her a while back, Mom has been at least three different mothers: the one of my childhood (loving), the overlord of her troublesome teen (we’ll get to that), and the one I’ve had for the last several decades, who’s more than “just” my mother; she’s someone I’d have chosen as a friend.

The Small of today little resembles the Snake-Eyes of my adolescence. You knew you were in big trouble when her green orbs narrowed into slits and shot out bolts of lightning. It was really something, let me tell you. (She’s not so good at that trick any more—rusty, probably.) And you’d better hope she didn’t get Dad involved. As a united front, the two of them were formidable.

I’m the first to acknowledge that the late ’60s and early ’70s must not have been a super-fun time to raise a kid who might have been just the tiniest bit rebellious, eccentric and wild. (I won’t incriminate my two siblings by referring to them thus.)

Mom and Dad were exceptionally vigilant, and stricter than the parents of most of my friends. I remember one time—I was about 17—when I got home five or ten minutes before my 11:00 p.m. curfew. It was a warm summer night. As I walked toward the house from the car, I was alarmed to see my mother waiting for me out on the front stoop, ghostlike in her gossamer white nightgown. Just sort of floating there. Menacing.

Warily, I approached.

“You’re almost late!” she chided. And then she went all Snake-Eyes at me and thrust out a hand holding a small, tubular item. “I found this in your room. What is it?!”

On her palm lay a Sher Bidi, one of those Indian tobacco cigarettes wrapped in a dried leaf. You could buy them at any store that sold smokes. Needless to say, she thought it was marijuana.

I don’t envy my parents. I’m pretty sure Mom still hasn’t completely gotten over a few of our teen antics. Then again, it seems every generation of parents faces its own challenges, each having to figure out how to raise kids during uncertain times with ever-shifting norms.

[Editor’s note: She never did find my actual stash. In fact, I hid it so well that I myself didn’t discover it again till sometime in the 80s. While flipping through my old records, I came to an album whose cover had a strange bulge. I reached in, and voilà: a plastic baggie holding a faded green herb. It didn’t smell like it had ever been pot, even in its youth, so I got to wondering how much oregano and other weirdness we must have inhaled during those years.]

Anyhow, we all lived through it and here we are.

So, Small…

I’ll bet you’re glad that stretch is far behind us. I wonder if, given the choice, you might have decided to opt out of those few years. But now, as you’re busy counting only the happy hours, think of how many of those we’ve had.

And though these horrific Covid times have kept us from seeing each other as much as usual, here are some experiences we have to look forward to, as you—like it or not—careen toward 94:

• Introducing each other to new mixed metaphors and malapropisms that we have stumbled upon as we’ve sailed along the road of life. [Ha ha.]
• More unexpected outbursts of rhyme.
• Analyzing and hypothesizing about life’s challenges.
• Co-solving future NYT puzzles.
• And of course our chats most every day.

By the way, I had no idea, back in early Covid when we began the ritual of daily phone calls, that I would come to rely on them. On those rare occasions one of us happens to be unavailable, my day has a small Small-sized hole in it.

Okay, that’s it for this year’s natal tribute. In conclusion, I’d like to say…

Today is Small’s birthday. We will all sing happy birthday to her.

All together now: raise your voices in celebration.

I’m glad you’re here, Ma. Thank you for everything.