Chapter Eighteen
Meet My Mom
My mom, like everyone in my family, was a character, but much more idealistic and impetuous than I am. Artistic, creative, and dramatic are adjectives that would describe her. Pragmatic, down-to-earth, cautious—not so much.
People like that are more likely to have amusing mishaps. For instance, if you put on a bikini and paint yourself from head to toe with gold spray paint from the hardware store for a Goldfinger Halloween costume (sister #2), you might win a ride in an ambulance. If you use glue to give yourself spiky hair for funny-hairdo-day (sister #1), you’ll have an amusing anecdote about the spiky hairdo that wouldn’t go away.
Here’s an example of my mom’s impulsiveness. When sister #3 was getting married in Douglas, Arizona, a potent norovirus swept through the wedding party. This illness made the black death seem like mild sniffles, and came on quickly.
The night before her planned drive back to San Diego, my mom started feeling sick. She knew what was coming, but instead of the practical choice of waiting to see how bad it would be, or waiting until she recovered, she threw all her stuff in the car at midnight and started on the seven-hour trip home. The result was an entertaining story about the nightmare car drive from hell. In addition, it had slipped her mind that we had some more wedding events the next morning. The bride was not pleased.
My point is that careful people have fewer adventures. Whether this is good or bad depends on your point of view. You want adventures like this? Just be less cautious. The most entertaining adventure books start with sentences like this: “I set off on my around-the-world solo trip having been on a sailboat only twice in my life.”
I’ve had to work hard all my life to compensate for my inherited “Spacey Macy” tendencies. I depend on checklists and unbreakable rules such as “don’t put anything on the roof of the car, even for a second.” Once, as a musician, I said to myself, “I’m tired of being so careful all the time. Musicians are carefree, maybe in my musician life I’ll be less careful.” When I was late for a concert, and had to walk out on stage after the first number and squeeze in between the other trombones, I went back to being careful.
When my mom announced that she would drive across the country alone with her 11- and 14-year-old children (my parents were divorced), most people thought that was reckless. Mom’s response was, “Oh, don’t be silly, it will be fine.” My 14-year-old self agreed with her, but I realize now that when you are an adult with two kids and a sketchy car, you don’t have much margin for error.
For example, our car broke down in Oklahoma on the side of the highway. A truck overflowing with rough-looking migrant workers stopped to help us, and my mom sent me off with them to bring back help. It turned out fine, but she later told me she was worried she’d never see me again.
The other mishap on this trip happened near Deming, New Mexico. In a thunderstorm, we found ourselves searching for an elusive campground. As we got further from civilization, the road (the correct one?) got muddier until finally we could go no farther. It was late at night, so Mom decided we should sleep in the car, and head back in the morning. We moved boxes around to give us enough room to sleep. This plan would have worked, except that one of the boxes rested against the brake pedal, turning on the brake lights, and resulting in a dead battery come morning.
We woke in a huge muddy field in the pouring rain, and one of us had to go for help. This time it was my mom that made the trip, and she returned several hours later riding on the back of a bulldozer. We got the car out, and resumed our trip. It wasn’t really that dangerous, but it was an adventure that wouldn’t have happened without the idealistic decision to make a somewhat risky trip.
I’m probably a more interesting person due to this upbringing, given that I didn’t end up as a slave in a migrant worker camp.