“Lotta Stories…”
A couple of years ago, my dear Aunt suggested I should compile some of my late mother’s expressions. As we are living through a moment as a Nation that is starting to resemble the Covid 19 quarantine in terms of both the shocking ambient instability and thuggish buffoonery, these chestnuts of wisdom that Mom left me have become a source of comfort.
Some of her epigramatic expressions were certainly collected from actual folks in her life, her all-time sickest burn: “I wish I knew as little about it as you do,” which she said only once but deployed very effectively at the time, was borrowed from the lexicon of my paternal grandfather.
Some expressions were certainly regionalisms collected from her youth in Pennsylvania, and her adulthood in Massachusetts, (her calling my Father “deaf as a haddock” certainly comes to mind), or from her ravenous reading, but each dictum held similar gravitas to me in my childhood irrespective of origin. In their repetition, they became almost a series of secular psalms, that encompassed her particular aesthetic, and I received them as such, not only because of their cleverness, but also because they weren’t actually suggestions in context. They were marching orders.
When she would say “don’t make a beef dinner” out of something, (an unseemly overreaction) or even worse “don’t get all hopped up,” the similarly ominous “don’t have a fantod,”or the most emphatic one: “Don’t have a conniption, “she wasn’t being rhetorical. “Beef Dinners” weren’t her kind of thing.
Composure and patience were two virtues she particularly espoused in her vernacular. She was very fond of the Persian/Arab expression: “This too shall pass,” but calls to composure (usually involving cautions about going full Broadway spectacle) were among the richest veins of folklorism: “Don’t make a production number out of it,” “Let’s get the show on the road,” and “Don’t make a whole song and dance about it.” She actually did work for a retired Broadway producer at Houghton Mifflin in the sixties, so it is likely her collection of theater slang stemmed from that experience.
Regarding patience, she would remind me “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” and “stick to your knitting.”
When assessing the big picture with composure, she would caution “Let’s see what the story is,” and remind me that “there’s a lotta stories in the big city.”
Displeased by something, she would observe “they really did a job on this.” Displeased by someone, she might acidly observe that they “needed to get with the program.”
I remember one expression she embraced in real time, when she discovered Robin Williams’s quip that someone was “a few tacos short of a combination plate.” She was delighted by it.
I’ve written before about her belief in the value of fortitude. Just slightly younger than Little Edie Bouvier, she was nonetheless similarly determined to remain “staunch” in the face of whatever came her way.
As she progressed in her life from Junior League woman to den mother to the denizens of Union Square Somerville in the nineties, one thing never changed, her commitment to living her life as the best version of herself she could manage on a given day. I do not believe she was aware of Yoda’s dictum, “Do or do not. There is no try,” but she sure lived that way.
This is not to say wouldn’t necessarily accept every twist of fate without the appropriate amount of swearing and Chardonnay, but she intrinsically understood that everything had an arc, and if you could come through sunshine and storms with equal equanimity, circumstances wouldn’t ever have the last word. Her ability to live through them with a dignity summoned from inside, rather than granted by circumstance, would mean the last word would always be hers.