My mother has big dreams for me. She wants me to grow up to do something significant and useful. She wants me to not quit, and to stay strong, and to hang in there, like a kitten on a motivational poster.
She won’t let me always use the calculator, because then I won’t learn how to actually solve a problem (“…what if you don’t have batteries someday?”). She teaches me to type on the manual typewriter because the added effort make my fingers “remember better”. She gives me timed tests of multiplication tables so that I know them by heart, in case there’s an emergency someday requiring swift numerical products.
But what she wants is only eclipsed by what she doesn’t want. She didn’t want me to be lazy, and she didn’t want me to be bored.
I was actually forbidden to be bored, because there was always something to be done, and once she had worked all that summer to make the extra money to buy our set of encyclopedias, there was always something to be learned as well, in alphabetical order no less.
I had to persevere, work hard, and appreciate my opportunities, because back when I got ‘em, they were all NEW. I’m in the first generation to enjoy the fruits of the civil rights movement. I CAN be an astronaut when I grow up, or the President of The United States! (well maybe not the President: that would be crazy). There are brown GI Joe dolls and news anchors and I have the right to eat at any restaurant and walk on both sides of the street and vote, as if it had always been that way.
My potential can, at last, map my actual future, rather than a societal GPS restricting me to “ a u-turn at Ambition, then merge right onto Oppression and continue forward for 100 years”.
Thus, my mother’s role models for me are Moses, Jesus, and Martin Luther King. You know, no pressure.
Moses was Charleston Heston, an American actor of English descent. I mean, the real one was super brown, but the one I saw part the Red Sea every year was this guy. He is listed in Wikipedia as an activist, which surprised me since he later in life was very much a key face of the most conservative ideas in the nation, but it is true that he was a very active supporter of the civil rights movement for decades.
Anyway, Moses was determined; he didn’t let his mean brother (Yul Brenner) stop him from standing up for what he believed in, and led a people out of bondage and into freedom, every year, right there on TV (also in the Bible: I did read the book before we saw the movie). Jesus was a hero whose superpower was love, proving that ideas and emotions were as influential as any army. And I was lucky enough to actually share the planet with Martin Luther King for almost two years.
These men worked hard to do something significant. They hung in there. But two out of three of their stories didn’t really end all that well, and I asked my mother about that when I was nine or ten.
“Why are all the heroes (you want me to be like) people that had horrible things happen to them?”
We are almost home in the car, making the last few turns before we drive up the alley to our backyard parking spot.
“I don’t know what you mean.” She does know what I mean.
“Really?”
“Well, I don’t think about it that way. I think about what they did when they were living, who they decided to be. You get a chance to be and do things I could never do, but it’s your job to take things further and keep going. They kept going. That’s all I mean. You don’t have to end up like they did if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t think they wanted to end up the way they ended up either.”
“Well, Moses did ok.”
“He was a farmer.”
“Well, you can be a farmer if you want to do that.”
When my mother begins to speak like Lewis Carroll, our conversations are over. She’ll talk about anything, give me all the advice she can, delve into subjects and philosophies most parents would never breach, but when logic pretzel-loops over itself, she’s done. I get out of the car and open the gate and let the car in and then close and lock the gate behind it. I don’t bring this up again for years, because I clearly saw the inexpressible anguish and complexity in the corner of her eye.
Over a decade later, I sit with my mother going through a giant scrapbook. My grandfather has just passed, and among his newspaper clippings and photos we find a church bulletin announcing Martin Luther King speaking from the auditorium of my old high school, which at that time was actually my mother’s all black high school in Kansas City, Kansas. I had no idea that Dr. King had spoken there, there should have been a plaque or something: I’d performed Pinter and Ionesco on that stage (and had my second ever kiss there), but I would have treated the room with way more reverence.
“You know, your Grandfather picked him up at the airport.”
“Martin Luther King???”
“Yes. Grandpa was chosen to go get him and take him back. I guess he volunteered.”
“Grandpa, spent one-on-one time, in a car, with Martin Luther King… and he didn’t talk about this, like, every year at Thanksgiving?”
“Why would he do that? Oh, I see.”
She puts the bulletin back in the scrapbook. “Martin Luther King was famous, but we didn’t talk about him like a celebrity. It was what he had to say that was important. He was teaching us all to fight...well, not fight, but to stand up for ourselves. Like a teacher.”
“Did you go to this?” I ask her. To me it’s like a Beatles concert that she’s just failed to ever mention.
“I must have. I didn’t ride in the car, though, that was just the two of them.”
Martin’s general dream supported my mother’s very specific ones, paving a way for me to be determined, inventive, and curious without all that being against any law. In no way am I any of the three people my mother suggested, but I am not lazy, and I am never bored, and hope that, whatever this is I’m doing, counts as “taking things further”.
“Grandpa said he was very nice, and he enjoyed speaking with him.” my mother added, super casually.
Wow. ‘Cause as you must by now recognize, I do not share my grandfather’s talent for understatement: I would have printed up a hundred t-shirts saying “I Took Dr. Martin Luther King to the Airport and Then Made This T-Shirt!!!”
Well, I guess I’d only really need the one shirt.
M, J, & M again.