FIRST OFF, you need to understand that my mother does not change. She will not do anything she doesn’t want to do. She will not reconsider, waver, or retreat.
When she was younger, she might have had a little bit more flexibility in her character, but now that has dried up, calcified, and turned to stone. Her backbone does not bend or twist, and her head is about as hard as an English walnut.
She doesn’t care what the world does. It spins around her. Time passes, but she doesn’t hitch a ride. It curves around her too. I guess she’s earned it.
Recently, she required a fairly serious surgery on her hand. The nurses informed her that before she could go into the operating room, she needed to disrobe and put on a hospital gown.
“I won’t,” she said.
“Everyone has to,” I told her.
She went into surgery in her long johns, a turtleneck, her toboggan, and two pairs of socks. I am not making this up.
But nowhere is my mother’s hardheadedness more apparent than in her language. She is a very smart woman and was a reader till her eyes began to dim, but she refuses to pronounce words as they were intended. I don’t think this has anything to do with her education or with the fact that she’s a Southern woman of a certain age.
She has decided the way things are, how they should be, and the rest of the universe will have to correct itself to get in line with that. So far, she’s winning.
Decades ago, she was prescribed the blood sugar medicine metformin. She asked me to go get it from the drugstore and wrote down instructions.
So I told the pharmacist, “I’m here to pick up my mother’s malforming.”
There is a look pharmacists give you when you say something stupid. I believe they go to school to learn how to make that exact expression.
I went home ready to explain that she had it wrong.
It’s called ‘metformin,’” I told her.
“That’s just what I said,” she replied. “Malforming.”
She’ll give something a whole new name—and it doesn’t even need to resemble the actual one.
Jack Elam was a cowboy actor who guest-starred on Gunsmoke about 7,123 times. He had a walleye and an evil grin and almost always got shot. My mother called him “Booger Andrews.”
“Why?” I asked her.
“Because he looks just like Booger Andrews who used to live over by the Mill Village,” she answered.
And every time Jack Elam gets shot in a black-and-white Western show, my mother will sigh.
“Well,” she’ll say mournfully, “they’ve kilt Booger…again.”
But usually with words, she just changes little things. We are down to having only one fried-chicken restaurant we can go to, since the local KFC gave up on us about 15 years ago—people cried. Now Bojangles is our last remaining option.
“You mean ‘Bojingles,’” my mother will correct me.
“I reckon so,” I’ll say.
illustration by JOHN CUNEO