The Legacy

Happy Mother's Day to my mom who is busy weeding Heaven's vegetable garden. Time hasn't helped much. I still miss you, Mom.


As far as legacies go, my tastes lie with something simple, like a check. Or stock. Or heirloom china. Unfortunately Mama wasn’t the heirloom china type. What I got when she departed for the peaceful place where mothers don’t have to cook, clean, or say, “If I told you once, I told you a million times,” was not the inheritance I assumed was my birthright. What she left me was the very thing I was the least qualified to handle. Wisdom.

Giving me a lapful of life lessons is like tossing me a copy of the Atkins diet and a size six sheath dress and telling me the party starts at seven. You may as well shove the plans for building a biplane into my arms and tell me to be in Paris by midnight. When it comes to legacies, it’s best to just go ahead and hand me a gold bar.

Now that I’m in the stage of life where good advice usually involves a recipe loaded with fiber, I realize that what Mama left me was a handbook for life. Thanks to the seeds my mom planted in the rocky garden of my mind over the years, I’ve sailed through many of the stormy seas of life without having to evacuate to life boats. Turns out Mom knew best all along. Here are Mama’s Rules to Live By—along with some of my own observations for those who, like me, have trouble following directions.

1. There is something to love in every person. However, there are some people who hide that something really well. Actually, Mama just said that first part. I learned the second part from my sister.

2. If you rip a page out of your brother’s comic book, he can rip a page out of yours. This is a mother of four’s version of The Golden Rule. I learned to treat friends, family, and their possessions with respect. And I’ll never know what happened to Archie and Jughead that day at Riverdale High.

3. Give a child two cookies; one for each hand. This is a smart idea because it keeps the child busy for twice as long, diverts him from "helping" with your biscuit dough and prevents you from having to walk every morning for a week to work off two cookies that you would have eaten to relieve stress if your child had two hands free to plunge into the dog's food.

4. Don’t honk your horn at anybody. At first I assumed this was Mama’s version of traveling etiquette, but now I realize that she understood road rage long before anyone held up traffic trying to read road signs through the wrong part of skinny designer bifocals.

5. Always have a skill you can fall back on. By this, I know now that she meant a skill that will continue to be of service to the Community of Man. Unfortunately the skill I chose was typing, which caused typewriters to immediately become extinct.

6. If you’re not tall enough to see out the car window, sit on a pillow. Improvise. Adapt. Overcome. Even the Marines agree with her.

7. If something particularly unpleasant is happening to you, there’s probably a lesson involved. Wade through a puddle or two on the linoleum and you’ll remember to let the new puppy out. You’ll also remember to buy a mop.

8. Don’t sell things you can give away. That might not make sense in an e-Bay world, but knowing that someone who needs it will have a warm coat for the winter goes a long way toward offsetting the thrill of bagging $1.50 for your old hula lamp in an online auction.

9. Play to win. Unless that gets in the way of playing for fun. When playing Scrabble with an elderly woman who can’t see past her elbow, give her a break if she thinks she drew five blanks. Come to think of it, that’s how Mom always won at Scrabble, so there’s probably an extra lesson tucked in there.

10. Always take time to watch the birds at the birdfeeder. Time spent with nature is a peace of mind investment. And last winter, a tiny chickadee who muscled his way through a crowd of rowdy cardinals to have lunch gave me some great ideas for handling the next family reunion. And the big project due at work.

11. Don’t worry, it’ll get worse. This was my mom’s slogan. When I was three and ran to her with a skinned knee, she said it. She was right. I broke my arm. When I was thirty-three and getting divorced, she said it again. And soon my kids became teenagers. But by then, I had it figured out. If things can get worse, the problems that seem overpowering right now aren’t the end of the world. Things can also get better. So if teaching two teenaged boys to drive and adding them to my insurance is the worst life has to offer, I can handle it.

But I sure wouldn’t turn down a check.

Hornworms and Holes-in-One

Gardening is something I try every year to see if I still don’t like it--sort of like creamed spinach, white shoes, or televised golf. I know there are plenty of folks hanging on the edge of their recliner to see if Tiger Woods sinks that putt, but all I can see is a hundred acres, give or take a few azaleas, of lush green grass tended lovingly by a sea of gardeners for a bunch of guys that are only interested in the spot where the hole is.

Now it’s spring again, when a young lady’s fancy turns to thoughts of fertilizer, and in my mind’s eye I find myself once again nurturing a tiny tomato into full sandwich potential. Of course, my mind’s eye could benefit from the attentions of an optometrist, since it’s a recorded fact that I couldn’t grow ragweed with a bucket of mulch, six gallons of spring water, and the latest edition of the Farmer’s Almanac. But always the optimist, I am willing to spread a little Miracle Gro on the situation and give it the old compost try.

My problem is that I don’t have the necessary tools to garden properly. For instance, I need dirt. You would think that your basic dirt would pretty much come with the territory. But you have to have PH balanced dirt or dirt with Lyme disease or some such thing. What I have here in the southern United States is an amazing substance known as red clay. Red clay is a dirt substitute that comes in several forms; most notably copper-colored dust when completely dry, and copper-colored quicksand when wet. You can find it in large quantities on the sides of pickup trucks, the bottoms of children’s socks, or sunning itself in areas where grass is supposed to grow.

The other essential item I don’t have is water. The transportation of a tender seedling into my yard is a great way to ensure that all the water in the county will disappear into a sinkhole and a record-breaking drought will immediately seize the region, leaving nothing behind but dead worms and sunburned fish. It gives a whole new meaning to the term “dry county.”

“It’s amazing,” the anchorman on the news will say, drawing his brows together to show concern. “We haven’t had a drought like this since the last time Amy Mullis tried to grow a tomato plant. We’ve sent crews to investigate this breaking story.” And pretty soon helicopters will be circling my back yard like mosquitoes on barbecue night.

Every year about this time my sister arrives, dressed in root rot black, solemnly bearing the sacrificial tomato plant. She places it lovingly in a pot of expensive store-bought dirt that has been fortified with eight essential vitamins and minerals, not to mention the eleven herbs and spices, and leaves it to die. I don’t see why she just doesn’t just go ahead and throw the thing in the dumpster on the way over. It would save me the trouble of pulling the sticks out of the dirt brick come fall, an activity I like to call “harvesting.”

It’s not that I don’t intend to water the thing. The first day I check it diligently, cooing sweetly and testing for wetness like I’m growing a newborn baby on a vine, which would be an ideal way to have children if only they didn’t get root rot and hornworms.

Eventually I get distracted by important things like sugary snacks or why the Yankees have enough money to buy the International Space Station but won’t get a pitcher that’s not somebody’s grandfather and at least somebody’s grandfather than can hit the outside corner of the plate for goodness sakes, and forget to water the thing until it’s sending up tiny distress signals using the dust in the planter.

So this year as I pry the sickly remains of my nonproductive Big Boy out of the dust and slam it into the trash can with a single stroke, I can compare myself to Tiger Woods. We’re both good for a hole in one.

But I have to wonder how he deals with hornworms.