Don’t let the calm look fool you. My mother was a viking.
You don’t raise four rowdy kids by yourself, with no help from your no-good ex-husband (that’s the mildest thing she ever called him) without having a bit of the axe-wielding, long-boat raiding savage in you.
No one messed with my mom. Okay, a few people did. But they lived to regret it.
One time she was driving us home on a Friday night when a cop stopped her. I was, maybe, eight years old. The cop told her she ran a stop sign. She gave him a look that would freeze gasoline.
“I didn’t run that light,” she said. “I stopped, then drove on.”
“You ran it,” the cop said, “and you’ll sign this ticket.”
“I’m not signing that ticket.”
“Then I’ll have to arrest you and take your kids to a foster home.”
At this point my little sister and I were crying.
“Mom, just sign the ticket, please!” We wailed.
She turned to the cop and sneered.
“I’ll bet you think you’re a big man because you made my kids cry.”
She bullied him into putting on the ticket that she ran the stop sign at “zero miles an hour.” When she went to court, the case was dismissed.
My mother on the warpath was a joy to behold. Unless you were the subject of such warpath. Her usually mellow voice, raised to a steely war cry, could curdle the blood of the most hardened biker.
Last Friday was her birthday. I went to visit her at the cemetery down the road–the irony is that I rent an apartment down the street from where mom’s ashes rest. I told her about the Alfred Hitchcock Cover, about my new job with a law firm, about her grandson, my beautiful son who has a Ph.D, a lovely wife, and a baby girl, with another child on the way.
She was happy to hear all that. She said she wished she could have lived to read my cover story, then chastised me for waiting until I was in my Sixties to get this far. Okay, mom, I said. I’ll try to get the novel published soon.
I didn’t dare ask her about the afterlife. One thing I know. She’s up there with God, arguing forever with Joan of Arc. There’s no way she’d end up in the other place. The Devil is afraid of her.
For more about my mother, Dee Bruce, here’s a page my brother created.
Mark Bruce, Writer 