Page 48 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
prisoner of others’ views.) I still see it as one of my primary weaknesses that I need the approval of others, and I have little doubt that, while that fact operates to check negative actions on my part, it also weakens me.
My mother was a smoker, at least until she reached her late fifties. When she was “sitting on the phone” with one of her numerous friends, Avis, or Aunt Rose, there would be a Marlboro or perhaps a Parliament in hand, or, if not, she would be eating chocolate kisses, presumably to help her break the habit. This was not the best of ideas; she was allergic to chocolate. When she did “sit on the phone,” she was at her most vul- nerable to my ability to annoy her, which was an ability that I apparently spent a lot of time honing. The primary telephone hung on the wall above the counter of our narrow kitchen, and, when she “sat on the phone,” she sat on a step stool with a padded seat and a seat back made of aluminum tubing. In one instance that I recall with fiendish relish, I must have been bothering her during her call to the point when, after telling me multiple times to desist, she warned me for the last time and then took a swing at her bratty offspring. Unfortunately, although she was a pretty good athlete, in her anger, her swing missed me but con- nected with the hard aluminum back of the chair—painfully. This only led her to become angrier still and to take yet another swing at me, again to be thwarted by the back of the chair. To her everlasting credit, after exclaiming in pain again and then taking a brief pause to reflect, she must have been struck by the ludicrousness of the event, at which time she burst out laughing and hugged me. I laughed as well, but I beat a hasty retreat.
There was at least one other kitchen story that involves my mother and bears repeating. While most kids in the suburbs had a lot of experi- ence when it came to pets, dogs in particular, I never had a dog. Rather, I had two turtles, neither of which was important enough to me to even rate a name, and each of which left a terrible odor when he (she?) died. I also had a pet that really did matter: “Frisky,” the parakeet. Unfortu- nately for Mom, it was decided, presumably to keep Frisky’s aroma out of the living room and dining room, and for convenience when it came time to feed him, that Frisky’s cage be kept in the kitchen, right near
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