The Gift of Perspective, Mom’s Day 2009

Life has a way of putting things into perspective.
My mom is the kind of person who everybody wishes would mentor them.
Even if I could list all the community service she has done over the years, I wouldn’t do it. She’d be mad at me for the attention. And, even though I’m fifty now, she is still my mom and I know better than to mess with her.
Anyway, the things she did around my home town are not nearly as impressive as the things she did accidentally along the way with her kids.
Take, for instance, the last time we saw her Uncle Ernest alive.
Ernest Wilson grew up on a farm with four other brothers, eeking out a living in a family accustomed to the struggle of surviving.
He volunteered for WWII and soon found himself assigned to Dwight D. Eisenhower. After the war, he was invited to stay on as personal secretary to the general, soon to be president.
It was an invitation Ernest turned down because he had other dreams.
So, he came back to Texas, studied geology and was soon helping to guarantee that our nation’s oil supplies would be coming out of the ground in Texas.
At which point, he did a profound thing with his newfound wealth.
He paid for his nieces to go to college. Thus, my mom became a geologist herself. And she also met a cute Austin boy with a charming personality at the university.
The last time I saw Uncle Ernest, he was a few days away from death, pretty much comatose, in a nursing home in Dallas.
I can imagine my mom’s perspective; it was probably a difficult decision to take us kids to see him in that condition. She would have worried that we would remember him the wrong way, as frail rather than amazing.
My perspective is entirely different, of course.
I remember the tender way she sat on the edge of his bed and whispered her affection to him. I remember that he stirred briefly as if to respond.
Mom and I were remembering that day recently and we wondered what Uncle Ernest’s perspective would have been.
Was he disappointed to be confined to a bed, this man with the insatiable drive? Honestly, he didn’t seem restless at all; he seemed peaceful.
When you think about it from a certain perspective, sleep feels pretty good.
Waking occasionally to find someone you love hovering over you to tenderly tell you again how much they love and appreciate you, that’s pretty good, too.
This is how you treat the people you love, I remember thinking as a kid.
Thanks, Mom. I’m the lucky kid who got to be mentored by you in the quiet, accidental places where Life really matters.
And Happy Mother’s Day to all the gentle, loving moms out there, mentoring as you go.
Cathy Primer Krafve, aka Checklist Charlie, lives and writes with a Texas twang. Comments are invited at http://checklistcharlie.blogspot.com or cathykrafve@gmail.com.

My Spanish is Embarrassing

I always say, “If you grow up in Texas, you should learn Spanish.”
And I say so in dos idiomas.
With so much mom-pressure, our daughters will finally admit to being functional, though not fluent, in Spanish. I say they are fluent, but how in the world would I know? My Spanish is pitiful.
One day I was torturing our son with vocabulary at the hardware store when a senior gentleman had the nerve to correct me about teaching my son Spanish. His thought, which he emphatically shared with me, was that we live in America where the language is still English.
I guess he didn’t notice that we were already fluent in that language.
‘Scuse me, but I just hate being the dumbest person in a room, I explained to the elderly gentleman. If everybody is talking a language I don’t know, I assume they are talking about me. So, I guess I’m neurotic in more than one language.
The best reason I’ve heard for being serious about keeping English as our sole official language is that it makes it harder for politicians to lie to us if all public discussions take place in one language. We don’t want elected tricky officials making different promises to folks who can’t communicate with each other because of language barriers.
On the other hand, the economic reality in Texas is that retailers are finding it expedient to translate all signs into Spanish.
One of my favorite spots, The Noonday Store, serves up “the world’s best hamburgers” in any language. Their hamburgers are a terrific excuse to practice my Spanish.
Line up with folks from all over the American continents and choose from several daily specials that come with sides and homemade dinner rolls. Save room for dessert because there are always two choices of homemade cobbler.
My favorite part is you can order in two linguas because the owners, Flo and Bill, are as bilingual as you can get. And they are really patient with a middle-aged Angla practicing broken espanol.
Early in my bilingual career, I tried to explain to Flo, as I paid for my hamburger, that I was embarrassed because my Spanish is so bad.
There was a pregnant pause while all the bilingual people around me tried to decipher my Spanish. I felt myself grow uncomfortable as people stared at me with mystified expressions and then began talking rapidly to each other in Spanish, all the while smiling at me and nodding. Clearly, they were more embarrassed than I was.
As so often happens in life, sometimes what we say and what we mean are two entirely different things.
“Yo soy embaracado porque mi espanol es tanto malo,” I tried again.
Translated I think I said something like this, “I am pregnant because my Spanish is so evil.”
Cathy Primer Krafve, aka Checklist Charlie, lives and writes with a Texas twang. Comments are invited at http:/checklistcharlie.blogspot.com or cathykrafve@gmail.com.