While I have had much to say about my father, Mom has, until now, managed to stay out of the spotlight. No longer. In this story I will talk about:
“Mike!” the call began. “Come over here. Harris found an alligator skeleton under the house.” Click.
My mother wasted no time on the phone. She would often call and say, “Ya’ll come over tonight for supper.”
“All right, We…” Click
Back to the alligator tale. Cheryl and I rushed right over. After all, who can resist such a tantalizing invitation. When we pulled up in the driveway, Mom met us at the door. We walked around to the side of the house. She was barefoot, of course. Unless she had to wear shoes, my mother was always barefoot.
At the side of the house, beside the crawlspace, was the skull. Her brother Harris Case, had found it as he did electrical work under the house. It was about eight inches long and had rows of sharp teeth top and bottom. But it was not, as she speculated, an alligator.
The domed skull gave it away. This was the much less exotic Didelphis Marsupialis…an opossum. This “possum” had avoided the standard possum fate of dying in the road and had managed to pass his last hours at home, their home.
Don’t get me wrong here. She was plenty smart, and to be fair, there had once been an alligator in the family.
In the late ‘50s, she and Dad returned from a trip to Florida and presented me with a cardboard box perforated with air holes. I opened it and a six-inch alligator promptly clamped on to my finger. At the time, many Florida stores sold alligators the way hermit crabs are now sold to tourists. Hermit crabs, however, don’t grow to a dangerous unmanageable size.
Alligators, without doubt, make the world’s worst pets and in less than a year, my alligator was over a foot long and still hissed and threatened anyone within three feet of the aquarium. After many painful bites, I did not complain when Dad suggested donating him to Mrs. Harkey for the high school biology lab. I understand the vicious little…I mean the alligator grew to over two feet long and threatened many a student before he disappeared from the lab. The less said about that, the better. Don’t ask, don’t tell.
Back to my mother’s story. She and her siblings did not tell jokes. They were often funny and teased each other relentlessly but were never joke tellers. The combination of a hard-boiled Long Island Yankee father and a tough-as-nails Scots-Irish mother gave them all a no-nonsense view of life.
Mother loved to cook. Her aunt Azalee Harris, who lived in the house where the Fort Mill History Museum is now located, took mother under her wing and taught her everything from how to make gravy to setting a table. Mother’s “depression gravy” made with fatback, and chunks of boiled eggs was rivaled only by her creamed corn.
She loved to can vegetables and when her ancient pressure cooker gave up its steamy ghost, Dad bought her a new-fangled one. She tried it out one day when my sister Connie and her husband, Steve, were at the house.
As it was the first time to use this particular pressure cooker, Mom asked Steve to read the directions while she did the work. When everything was in the cooker and the lid was on, Steve read the direction sheet which said, “Tighten the lid completely and then back off a little.” Mother did as she was told. She tightened the lid as firmly as she could and then bumped into Steve as she “backed off” from the pot. Literal to the last. I can picture her, barefoot in the kitchen, arms spread, hands out, getting away from that pressure cooker.
She was Mama-Dot to the grandchildren and would have fought a bear to protect them. She was brave enough to travel with Dad at a moment’s notice and when he bought a big motor home, she carefully stocked it with all the necessities for cooking and cleaning. She learned to stow everything so that it would not fall out of the cabinets as Dad drove the camper up the winding road to Pike’s Peak or through the elk horn archways in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
On one trip to the west, the motor home broke down in Knoxville, Tennessee. Dad had not been happy with that motor home and so, decided to trade it in for a better model mid-trip. For fear of the wrath of Mama Dot, part of the negotiation was that the dealer move everything from the old motor home to the new one. Despite the wise move on Dad’s part, Mom stood outside in the summer heat with an “I can’t believe he did that” look on her face and with those deadly black eyes narrowed. There was little conversation for the next hundred miles.
On one trip, when my family was traveling with them through the West, Dad had promised Kate that we would stop at a place with a swimming pool. There was no room to sleep us all in the motor home so we would stop at hotels for the night. There was nothing with a pool available and we had to choose a lodge with individual cabins. Kate was only two or three and so Mom decided to keep her while Big Bob showed us around Jackson Hole Wyoming, his favorite western town.
We walked along the row of western stores and Dad shared wistful stories about the cowboy life he wished he had lived. I bought a Stetson hat and we reserved tickets for the rodeo that night. We enjoyed the tour but a better time was being had back at the lodge.
Dad had promised Kate a swimming pool and by god, Mama Dot would see that she had one. We walked into a cabin full of giggles and squeals and splashing water. Mother had found the largest trash can she could, filled it with water, and Kate was having the time of her life. I don’t know what the owners thought had happened after we left and they discovered the soaked carpet.
One time Mom didn’t travel with us. Dad decided he would take what he called “The whole Famn Damily” on a tour of Europe. The man always thought big. Steve, Connie and Robbs plus Cheryl, Kate, Case and I were all included in the plan. Mama Dot wisely bowed out to look after the home-front and, I am sure, get some rest from the full-speed-ahead Bob Hill.
We were packed and ready to leave for the airport when Mom came out the door.
“The kids will get tired of bottled water,” she said. “Take this Kool-Aid to mix with it.” Great idea, terrible delivery system. She handed me a zip-lock bag full of white powder.
We all immediately knew that we would miss our flight and maybe spend some time in the pokey if we tried to board with that bag in our luggage. Thankfully, our driver volunteered to take the bag and dispose of it discreetly. We never let Mom in on our deception. She didn’t ask about the Kool-Ade, and we didn’t tell.
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