Today I broke an essential clause of the Man Code. I took Betty, my mother-in-law, to the hair salon. Even saying “hair salon” feels like a sell-out. In my family it was always called the “beauty parlor” and to my father, the “hair twister”.
Yep, this is the mother-in-law who threatened my life if I ever hurt her daughter and the very same one who claimed I pushed her down a hill when she actually fell backwards attempting to catch a nerf football thrown over her head by her eight-year-old grandson. Producing that grandson is probably a great part of what has kept me alive and she never pressed charges on that push claim so, the beauty parlor it was.
In the pre-free thinking 1960s, My mom, Dot, and her friend Irene would spend half-a-day at the beauty parlor and would sit under those ubiquitous space helmet dryers. They would return home with hair shaped into a jet-black volleyball and sprayed to a cotton candy gloss. Thankfully, Jackie Kennedy put that style to rest. That makes up for the pill-box hat craze.
Irene and Mom were famous friends. We lived next door to the Davises when Dad bought small house on Gregg Street. Bill and Irene moved to Fort Mill from West Virginia where Bill had managed to climb out of life as a deep shaft coal miner to work with the Celanese Company. Their sons Michael and Billy were stair-stepped in age between me and Connie and the families became forever intertwined.
Many of our “first experiences” were shared with the Davises. I am told, although I don’t remember that I was very slow to give up drinking milk from a bottle. Mom said I would carry it around in the back pocket of my blue jeans. She finally said that the one I had was the last one and when it broke, I was bottle-weaned. I don’t know how old I was but I do know that when it broke, I was old enough to go next door and borrow a bottle from Irene. Come on, folks, Sometimes a bottle is just a bottle and anyway, now I use a highball glass.
Gregg Street was on the fringe of town and Fort Mill was still rural enough so that a few people in the area still raised chickens in the back yard. I mention that to segue into the “Great Chicken Misadventure”. Dad was working three jobs to keep our heads above water and one was part-time at the post office. When a crate of live biddies were left unclaimed, Dad decided to go into the back-yard poultry business. He built a chicken-wire pen and because it was January, put the tiny yellow chicks inside what we called the “little house”, a small storage house/workshop in the back yard. To keep them warm, dad plugged in a heat lamp near the pen.
The lamp kept the chicks from freezing but the next morning, Dad opened the door to the little house to find that the lamp had singed all their down black. Chicken ranching went downhill from there. A few grew to full chicken status and would mysteriously disappear sometime before Sunday dinner but I didn’t make the connection. Only one lived a full life. A tough-as-nails hen, too scrawny to eat, fell in with three cats who lived under the shed. They would free range together and sleep together. We were never sure if the chicken self-identified as a cat or if the cats were just open-minded.
Back to the mother-in-law…can’t forget her. She may have blamed me for her tumble down the hill but her grandchildren can do no wrong. Once when my son Michael and I were leaving her house, she called out a warning to me. “Drive carefully. You’ve got precious cargo.”
“I will,” I told her, “I’ve got Michael with me too.”
I come from a family of big eaters. I get my size from my Dad whose mother was an old-fashioned country cook. Dad used to say she couldn’t make ice cream without frying up a little fatback first. Of course, my mother was the best cook ever and a saint in this world but my mother-in-law only comes in second because I am biased. I am partial to her chicken pot pie but her country style steak with gravy and mashed potatoes has given me many a gastronomic guilt trip.
The first few times I had dinner at Betty’s house she caught me off guard. Her catch phrase was “Reach and eat!” Obedient son-in-law that I am, I would, against all sensibility, eat seconds of everything on the table and be in the throes of early onset eater’s remorse when she would say, “Save room for some pound cake and strawberries with ice cream.”
Not that store-bought sorry excuse for pound cake…noooo. Betty’s famous pound cake that was moist and had the perfect crust that by itself deserved a franchise... Betty’s Perfect Pound Cake Crust. And the strawberries, fresh picked from the Peach Stand and drooling their red juice over vanilla ice cream… who could resist? Well not me.
She doesn’t fool me anymore. I know full well when I go for that second helping of everything that there will be dessert, but I go anyway. “Damn the potatoes, full speed ahead!”
I guess I have wasted enough of your precious time and she should be finished at the hair salon by now. Since I have already lost any status in the “He Man Woman Haters Club”, I will wait patiently for her outside the shop and when she gets into the car, I will tell her how nice she looks. I always try to take care of Betty.
Precious cargo!
A wise person once said,"Tell the truth and run away!" That might be a good idea. This week I write a little about my Mother-in Law.