I’m having a beignet for breakfast. Well, a couple … they’re small. Our son was recently in New Orleans on business and picked up a box of beignet mix to give to Donna for Mother’s Day. I couldn’t tell you how they compare to the real thing, because these are the first ones I’ve ever had.
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That’s my mother on the left: Eileen, who died too young in 1977, but not before raising five children and brightening many lives. We all thought Charles, our father, would die of grief, and for a year he gave every indication of doing so. Then he met Lois, on the right, and after a short courtship they married. I never called Lois mom, because I’d been grown and gone since 1965, but my sisters and I think of her as our second mom anyway. She made my dad happy again, and nursed him through his final illness until he died in 2007. Lois lives today in the house Charles and Eileen bought in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, after retiring from the Air Force in 1971.
As I remind Donna every year, she’s not my mother, and Mother’s Day is a Hallmark holiday. I know exactly what Donna’s thinking: the hell you say.
She’s right. Donna’s not only the mother of our children, she’s as much a mother as a wife to me, and if I go before her I know she’ll care for me to the end, as Lois did for Charles. And this Hallmark holiday thing we all joke about? A base canard.
In 1905 a woman named Ann Jarvis began a campaign to establish a national holiday honoring mothers and motherhood. Congress rejected it in 1911, but by then many states had established Mother’s Day holidays, and in 1914 President Wilson proclaimed it a national holiday. The holiday quickly became commercialized, Hallmark Cards being one of the lead culprits, and by the early 1920s Ann Jarvis was leading another campaign, this time to boycott the commercialized version of Mother’s Day. This is just the American side of the story: different cultures and countries celebrate their own versions of Mother’s Day, and always have.
Then there’s this, which I saw on Twitter this morning:
I’m torn. Donna and I have a lot of friends, single and married, who have chosen not to have children. Do they live rich and fulfilling lives? Yes, they do. Do they enrich our lives? Yes, they do. Do I treasure them any less than our friends who have children? No. And anyway, it’s nobody’s goddamn business what choices they make. Why, then, does this tweet evoke such a “go fuck yourself” reaction in me?
Father’s Day, now? A crock of shit all the way. Which doesn’t mean I don’t hope the kids will at least call.
Donna wants me to grill steaks. It being Mother’s Day I guess I’d better, so that’s tonight’s plan, along with Game of Thrones. I hope Cersei’s revenge on the Faith Militant and the High Sparrow is as bloody and tasty as a good steak.
I saw a tweet mentioning a final season of Wallander, due to start airing tonight on PBS, so I set the DVR to record it. I was a bit confused, but I think I’ve figured it out now. There were two Wallander series on TV, a Swedish one and a British one. The Swedish series ended with Kurt Wallander retiring after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, as in the final Henning Mankel novel, so that series is over. The series I’m starting to tape tonight must be the British one, then.
We’ve given up on Fortitude, an Amazon streaming series. We can’t figure out what the hell is going on. We’re about to give up on Twin Peaks, too. We never watched it back in the day, so it’s new to us, but it’s dated and campy … which makes me wonder how we’ll look on series like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Fargo, and Better Call Saul 20 or 30 years from now. I tried to watch Buffy the Vampire Killer, which my friends all love, but compared to Veronica Mars it doesn’t stand up. I’m spoiled.
What else is new? This morning I installed an iPhone holder on the new mountain bike. Rather than buy a wireless speedometer/odometer like the one on the bike that was stolen, I’m going to use a free iPhone app called MapMyRide. Sure, I could carry the phone in my pocket, but the few times I’ve done that I’ve either forgotten to turn the app on at the start of my ride, or to turn it off afterward … if the phone is on the handlebar and in my face I’m less likely to forget to start and stop it.
We were up to almost 100°F earlier this week, but it’s cooled down significantly. It’s in the high 60s at the moment, and I’m actually thinking about wearing a jacket when I go out on the motorcycle, which is my afternoon plan. Donna’s sewing, and I’m going to get out of her hair for a while.
Polly’s at Ace Hardware today, working her shift. On Wednesday she got a call from a former co-worker who had recommended her for a payroll job with a startup human resources company in Phoenix. This is different from the the job she interviewed for a couple of months ago, which was with a similar company and for a similar position (she was told she had that job but that it would not start until July; none of us, Polly included, is counting chickens on that one). Anyway, Polly went to Phoenix on Thursday and interviewed. She thinks it went great; we’re waiting to hear back. Meanwhile, there’s Ace. The friendly hardware place.
All right then. The open road beckons. Happy Mother’s Day to all the wonderful mothers I know!
Re the tweet – it is not the average American or westerner that is repsonsible for the current population explosion. It is the people in Africa who have 16, 18 or for those men, like President Zuma of South Africa, 21 or even 35 (I me a harriette from Nigeria who was one of her Muslim father’s 35 kids and that ws the highest I heard until someone told me last month they met a man with 42 children. 46 of the top 50 countries with birthay are African – out of 54 African countries.
Jeanne, I almost said nothing, worried that people might find my reaction to that tweet offensive, particularly my many friends who choose not to have children. People with children invariably come across as smug if they say anything about those with none. But my reaction was to the person who wrote the tweet, not to the subject of whether or not to have children, because that person, to me, came across as uber-smug. As to the Third World, you’re totally correct. Our population growth is very much under control, because we don’t have to depend on a slew of children to support us in our old age. Folks elsewhere do not have that luxury … it’s survival to them, and I try not to judge. Hey, for once we can’t blame the Chinese, right?
I don’t believe this view that the major driver behind having so many children is so they can look after you in your old age. If that was true, women in developing countries, who are really the people at the bottom of the barrel, would want to have more children but studies consistently show that they want less but it is not in their control. Why does RSA President Zuma have 21 children – he siphoned off a lot of money, he’s wealthy. Why did that wealthy father of the harriette have 35 children? Why do 7 out of 10 black children in the Western Cape live without their father – they’re not going to look after their absent father in his old age. Having lots of children in Africa is a male macho thing. A friend of my parents travelling in Kenya was told that he was not a man by astonished Kenyan men when he said he (and his wife) have no children. An artile in Rwanda about traditionl culture quoted an elder as “a Rwandan man will always be judged by the number of children and cattle he has.” Many of he drivers I had in Zambia – all of whom had good jobs with good pensions, had large families – it is a cultural thing they would tell me. And here’s what really annoys me when they talk about climate change etc., the don’t factor in population growth. That is taking political correctness too far.