My mother, the navigator
I don’t readily accept change. I’m a terrible traveler and I resist new technology. Oh, yes, and I’m not the most sociable person in the world. Otherwise, I am perfect.
Obviously, this website is proof I eventually surrendered to the personal computer, though several years ago I was one of the last editors at the Providence Journal to make the switch from the electric typewriter to PC. (Previously I had been reluctant to abandon the manual typewriter.) For a long time at the Journal I lagged behind other staff members in adapting to inevitable computer upgrades . . . until my position earned me my very own Mac, which became my all-time favorite toy, one that enabled me in retirement to solidify my status as a hermit.
As a hermit, I refuse to own a cell phone, though I realize the device has become as much a part of life as television and the automobile. I had a cell phone a few years ago, but used it perhaps twice before discarding it. I have no interest in getting another, though little ol’ hypocritical me is grateful (especially during long trips) for the cell phone that belongs to my wife. It’s reassuring to know that no matter where we might be, we’re almost never out of touch with those who can help in time of need, like when we’re in the middle of nowhere while driving through Virginia on Interstate 81.
HOWEVER, AT HOME I often get annoyed when I see someone using a cell phone while driving. That’s because the people I usually see aren’t on long trips, so they’re not reporting an emergency or making or breaking hotel reservations. Chances are they’re simply chatting with a friend during a short drive from their home to their workplace or a nearby store. It’s not like they need to consult anyone and it’s unlikely they are tending to anything that couldn’t wait until after they reached their destination.
More annoying are those who carry on cell phone conversations while shopping. I run into these people a lot because I do most of the family’s grocery shopping. It’s a habit I got into as a teenager because my mother never got her driver’s license. As soon as I got mine, I was drafted to replace my father as the designated driver for supermarket trips. I got used to supermarkets; heck, I actually began to enjoy them.
What’s not enjoyable is finding a woman – sorry, it’s almost always a woman – who is lost in conversation while she and her shopping cart become an aisle-blocking piece of performance art. It would be understandable if she were asking a family member about which product to buy – after all, supermarkets have become notorious for their dazzlingly difficult multiple choice tests, especially when it comes to coffee, juice, detergents, shampoos and toothpaste. But mostly I hear women engaged in small talk . . . such as reciting the reasons they hate grocery shopping. (“Hey, lady, here’s one you can add to your list!”)
Worse is when you sit down in a public place and find yourself next to someone who is blithely conducting a very private conversation. (“Last night my daughter’s husband punched her again and this time she’s thinking about calling a lawyer, but the problem is she’s pregnant and doesn’t know for sure who the father is . . . ”)
Am I exaggerating? Not much. I experienced something similar while waiting for a prescription at a Publix Pharmacy when a woman seated nearby broadcast her end of the conversation at full volume.
AT SUCH TIMES I often think about my mother, who died in 1998. I still miss her, but have concluded she got out of this world at the right time.
My mother was a very private person. She’d have been embarrassed to find herself subjected to a stranger’s real-life soap opera.
On the other hand, she would have appreciated the convenience of a cell phone, though she’d never have made a call within earshot of another person. (“Nobody has to know our business!”) That’s not to say she wouldn’t have made life difficult for the person she was calling because my mother was a worrier who needed to share her concerns with a trusted family member. As she aged, my mother’s worries intensified, so did her need to share them.
At this point in her life, my mother’s most trusted family member was my sister, Mary, who had become my mother’s taxi service during my father’s declining years. (He died in 1985.) Mary and her family lived about five miles from my parents and the two homes were connected the old-fashioned way – by a land line. So if my sister weren’t home, my mother couldn’t reach her and had to leave a message.
If my mother and sister had owned cell phones during the 1980s and ‘90s, my sister probably would have been driven crazy (unless she did what, surprisingly, very few people seem to do – turn the damn thing off).
I PICTURE IT this way: Mom calls Mary to announce she’s ready to be picked up for a trip to Wegman’s supermarket. Then Mom goes outside, cell phone in hand, to wait by the driveway (assuming it was not raining or snowing in Solvay, the foul-weather capital of the world). Ostensibly she’d do this for my sister’s convenience, being prepared to get into the car the moment Mary arrived. However, she’d call my sister a minute later to inquire why it was taking so long. She might call two or three more times – perhaps expressing concern my sister had been in an accident. And if my sister were on the phone – talking to my mother – when she pulled into the driveway, my mother would greet her with, “Do you think it’s a good idea to talk on your cell phone while you drive?”
Greater torture would await Mary after the shopping trip. Seconds after she drove away, my mother would call her once morel. “You’ve got to come back, Mary. There are a few things I forgot to buy at the store.”
As it was, my sister received thousands of phone calls from my mother during that period, but at least she was out of reach when she was in her car or running her own errands.
SPEAKING OF CARS . . . I consider myself fortunate the GPS (global positioning system) wasn’t around during my mother’s life. That would have given her the ammunition to make short trips unbearable, at least if I were driving.
Explanation: I left home in my early 20s and lived in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island during the last 36 years of my mother’s life. I often returned to Solvay for visits, and when I did I usually took her shopping, but I would drive one route to get there, another route to return. If we had to go to the store again the next day, I’d take yet a third route, return via a fourth route. It was my way of seeing how things had changed in my old stomping grounds. This was particularly true during a period my mother did her food shopping at a supermarket about ten miles from her house. This gave me the opportunity to cover a lot of territory.
My mother, however, invariably thought I had gotten lost. Her thinking was, “Jack doesn’t live here anymore, so he doesn’t know where he is going.”
I kept assuring her I still knew the area better than anyone in the family. Her reply was either “But your father never goes this way” or “Your sister never goes this way.” I’d tell her it was because they were creatures of habit. I’d appeal to her sense of adventure, which was hilarious because on a scale of one to ten, my family’s sense of adventure (including my own) rated no higher than two.
Our drives always took approximately the same amount of time, but she continued to believe I was driving around lost when I departed from what she believed was the one true way to get from her driveway on Russet Lane to the supermarket on Onondaga Boulevard. Having a GPS in the car would only have confirmed her suspicion because – from what I hear – the device is just as inflexible as my mother was.
Even when the magical Wegman’s supermarket arrived on West Genesee Street, cutting our drive in half, my mother would give me grief over the routes I took to get there. “Why are you driving past the (old) high school? Mary never goes this way!” GPS would have supported my mother who had perfected a special withering glance for such I-told-you-so moments.
ON THE OTHER HAND, I wish we had had GPS during the first sixteen years of my life when there was no New York State Thruway and no Interstate Highway System. GPS certainly would have helped us on our many family trips throughout the northeast. During these trips, my sister and I sat in the backseat while Dad drove and Mom functioned as navigator, a map spread across her lap. To shade her eyes, Mom often wore a cap with an unusually long visor. This was a comical sight because these trips were the only time my mother ever wore a cap. I’m not sure where this partiular cap came from, but I suspect my father had acquired it for fishing.
As navigator, Mom did a good job of getting us from Point A to Point B, but where she encountered difficulty was in the second part of her job – selecting places for our food stops. She made these selections through observation and instinct. There were times her instinct almost caused accidents.
It worked like this: she’d start looking for restaurant signs along the highway. If she got a good feeling about the restaurant from its sign or its name, she’d alert my father the we might be stopping a few miles down the road. Key word: might.
When she saw what she thought was the restaurant, she’d tell him to slow down, or worse, enter the parking lot. That’s when things often got hairy because Mom would quickly assess the place, usually decide against it, and urgently shout, “Not here! Keep going!” Maybe she felt we'd have a moral obligation to visit the place if we lingered outside for even a moment. When this happened several times in a row, my father might become so irritated he’d impulsively swerve back onto the highway without seeing his way clear. He managed to escape accidents, though we were honked at from time to time. Luckily my mother usually made her decisions during the slow-down stage, before my father had left the highway.
We might occasionally spot a Howard Johnson’s, one of the era’s few franchises and therefore the only recognizable restaurant we were likely to see, but I don’t recall the family ever stopping at one. Perhaps my parents already knew what I would discover a few years later – that while the food at a Howard Johnson’s wasn’t bad; actually, some of it was quite good – the service was excruciatingly slow. The only chain restaurant that would ever provide a stiffer test of my patience was Friendly’s, which could have adopted as its slogan, “Here today, gone tomorrow.”
BUT BACK TO my mother, the navigator. I never kept score, but my guess is we abruptly sped away from three restaurants for every one that met my mother’s approval. She generally did a good job with her final selections, though perhaps her method was to keep us waiting so long that we’d reach that stage of hunger where anything would have tasted good. This is unlikely, but I can’t rule out the possibility because Mom was a lot easier to please than the rest of us, who were were obnoxiously – and monotonously – fussy about food.
Now, of course, it’s incredibly easy to find restaurants along most highways, though this defeats one purpose of taking a trip. That is, the restaurants you choose shouldn’t be exactly like those around the corner from your house. Why drive 1,000 miles to stop at Dunkin’ Donuts?
If you were a Major, you’d know the answer. To us, a Dunkin’ Donuts breakfast is a vacation highlight.
Don't get me wrong. I was extremely lucky to have Buster and Helen Major as parents. And for my father's sake, if there is such a thing as reincarnation, I hope in his next life he finds someone a lot like Mom. As for my mother, well, I just hope that in her next life she learns to drive.
– JACK MAJOR |
