I’ve got this Mom!
Birth begins the struggle to be free, and with most boys, somewhere along the line, there is an event where a man begins to emerge, takes out the scalpel he never knew he had and severs the emotional umbilical he has been tethered to since that birth. For me it was the day that Mommy became Mom and was no longer entirely the boss of me. I have never noticed this ritual of passage with daughters. Most daughters seem to remain close to mothers for life, even interdependent. Not so much with boys.
The years following my father’s demise were a great struggle for my mother. There was some insurance, some savings, and nothing owed on the house but most income had stopped. Year by year the house was left without repairs and the four sons grew as did the size of their infractions, which became more than just adolescent mischief. She tried to cope by bringing other males into our family’s life. I am not talking any romance for her here, I am talking priests who poured bottomless buckets of advice over her and absolution over the four of us, and certainly not Mother’s financial councilors, who lost much of what little money she had left.
It was 1965 when mom talked a marine recruiter into recruiting me and my little brother. She wanted us to start thinking about manly things and have a manly influence in our lives. I was 17, Johnny 15 (why not have him listen in). My oldest brother, Billy the eldest, had joined the Navy. Bobby, second in line, who famously said in a high school newspaper interview, “You couldn’t pay me to walk a mile,” was off adventuring into the growing world of San Francisco’s mind-altering alternatives.
As for the youngest two, well, a little male influence might be just the timely thing. She would have the Marine visit us in our game room just as the delicate free world was beginning to cower from a never-ending stream of pissed-off Vietnamese peasants — peasants who would begin down the road of our destruction by tottering the first of what were called “Dominos.”
The North Vietnamese or what would become flatteringly referred to as “Gooks,” or the results of one friend’s work, who later oversaw military incendiary devices, “Crispy Critters,” were the enemy. They were according to our leaders, worth the 2 million lives lost, including 55,000 Americans, to keep anyone from collapsing that first “Domino.”
This is what happens to school yard fights as we age and whoever has the megaphone yells, “Fight, Fight, FIGHT.” Almost all those yelling getting to watch as “Seconds” do all the back lot brawling. But again, I get ahead of myself.
Back to the day of my surgical removal of the umbilical. My brothers and I were all given chores and on rare occasions when Mom ran out of ideas, we were sent off on some make work chore just to keep us out of trouble — in my case, from starting fires and such. “Kimmy,” she said, “Take this new hoe,” a hoe she had purchased to replace the one brother Bobby had intentionally broken the week before on a similar order, “and weed the back lot behind the house.” Now the back vacant lot was a half-acre plot Mom and Dad had purchased as an investment. My rebellion came on suddenly without plan and a neighborhood football game in the waiting. I looked at the lot, I looked at the hoe, and then said the most powerful two letter word representing freedom for any child said to any parent, “NO.” And then ran into the neighborhood, a neighborhood every child knows better than their parents. She searched but as she would recall sometime later, that was it, the moment when things flipped.
The transition wouldn’t be obvious to anyone on the out looking in. As my brothers and I were now in our teens our bad judgment had gone from childishly moronic to dangerously idiotic. The crashing of cars was merely one symptom of other acts of passage, in our case, booze or drugs, and all the death-seeking recklessness that resulted and makes us marvel that any of us are still alive today.
But somewhere in our more malignant, viperous adventures the mommy caring for her kiddy’s flipped. Despite the pain our stupidity caused her, when Dad died it was clear: we might be irresponsible in a great many things but now would protect her. Mom rarely knew what was going on in our supersecret and largely self-destructive years. As crummy as we all turned out to be as teenies, that same engagement that infected our childhood years of defending each other now would put our widowed mother in a protective chrysalis.
Mom was cocooned between nukes, each primed in an impregnable mommy shield.
In my case, I can remember three incidents that came dangerously close to putting a victim — or perhaps me — in the hospital, if not a jail. The first was when I was in 7th grade and she first thought she might sell our home. The finances had dwindled, the house was in need of every repair imaginable and the two oldest of her brood out of the house and on adventures of their own. On a Monday, she had listed our home with a realtor. The following Thursday, I was again on my bike with Stevie on our way home from school. As I entered our driveway, I saw my mother sitting on the front steps, her head drooped in her hands. It was not a scene I was familiar with. A realtor was standing over her shaking a finger and angrily admonishing her — for what, I did not know.
Confused, I rode up and heard the realtor say, “You said you would sell if I got a buyer.” Then the realtor looked at me, as if to solicit support, and continued, “She lied to me. I have a buyer and now she says she isn’t sure.”
As I looked down at my mother, she glanced up at me with moist eyes, the closest I had ever seen her come to crying and with an expression I had never seen on her face — embarrassment.
I have no recollection whatsoever of what I did, what I said or how I acted. If anger can cause amnesia, then I had amnesia. What I do recall is the real-estate agent running out our driveway and screaming for help to anyone that might hear. Later Stevie said, although I didn’t believe him, and my mother never talked about it, that I moved mom out of the way before I swung, but that I had stumbled on the step and the blow only glanced off the realtor’s shoulder.
Stevie, as it turns out, was most impressed, not because I hit the agent or that I then chased the agent off the property, but for what he considered the most spectacular of reasons: the agent was a woman.
I would not strike another person for 40 years, when I delivered a wondrously successful left hook to the jaw of the director of my branch office at the University of Arizona (more later).
The second time I went Kimball Boy-Kablooie, I had started high school and my mother was running a little short on cash and took on a job as a travel agent. She had been told by the owner of a travel agency that she could see something of the world on the cheap if she worked for him. I suppose we all want to see something of the world before we go. It is what I am trying to do now, at roughly the age my mother was when she took that job.
She had been hired, not because of her great sales skills, but because the agency owner knew that she knew just about everyone in town with money. The kind of people that did or could travel the world. As it turned out she wasn’t very good at pressuring her friends to purchase expensive excursions and one day I came home from school to find her in tears. This time she was really crying. I pressed her for a reason and when she finally came clean she said, “The owner yelled at me and said I wasn’t doing a very good job, and that…………….” I didn’t hang round to hear the rest — the “yelled at me” was enough. It just didn’t take much for the Kimball Boys.
I was out the door, peddling my two-wheeled stallion to the electric chair for murder. When I got to the travel agent’s office a secretary looked at me in horror, for no better reason than my bicycle continued after my running dismount and crashed into the agency’s plate glass front window. As I entered, she stood up and unintentionally blocked the most direct route to my destination. And my destination was that that MOTHER-FUCKING SON OF A BITCH that stood behind her. In the time that it took me to circumnavigate her and her desk he dove into his office and bolted the door.
I don’t know if my mother had intended to quit her job, but she thought it best not to return.
Twenty-five years later I would go mommy-ballistic a final time. It was as Mom was beginning her life’s decline. This time, I would be a not-so-fully-grown-up of 39 and would write a piece about the episode for the local paper about how injustice can sprout greater injustice.
It happened just as I was beginning what would become my life’s work, the creation of an idea that would be called Vote Smart.
Seemed the idea occupied my every waking moment. I honestly thought the idea would save me and democracy. I was intensely focused, then the phone rang.
It was Mom, she said she had just been to Walgreens to pick up her heart medication but had gotten confused and couldn’t remember the exact name. The pharmacist poked around with some suggestions of what he knew it wasn’t, including one dealing with menopause which solicited laughter from other staff and those waiting in line behind her. Embarrassed, she walked out and asked if I would go get it for her.
“YOU BET, MOM.” With that I was off to the races again. Frothing at the bit, mouthing to myself what I had to say when I got to that pharmacist.
I never saw him — he was gone when I arrived at Walgreens, which was a fine thing, because by the time I got there I was in remorse.
You shouldn’t drive angry. It is my guess that angry driving might cause as many accidents as alcohol.
I had gotten in my old beat-up clunker and hit the gas hard, storming down a street called Speedway, only to find myself stuck behind a slow poke who just wouldn’t go. I hit the horn, not in a quick pop but a long leaning scream. When the light turned green, I angrily swerved around with just enough time to glare over. What I saw was a shaking elderly fellow. He was about the same age as Mom and drooped over his steering wheel, confused, scared, wondering what he had done wrong.
Within a block as I slowly turned into the Walgreens parking lot, I was drooped over my own steering wheel.
“A Kimball Boy,” an expression my older brother coined in reference to those moments of gargantuan stupidity, that on occasion bubble to the surface in each brother.
“A Kimball Boy” has some demented itch that renders them brainless when confronted by some imagined injustice. Say like my oldest brother Bill closing a desk drawer on the tip of his pinky finger, resulting in a half dozen crescent-shaped hammerhead indentations on the guilty — in this case Dad’s mahogany desktop.
Even as I type this sentence looking at the moon-shaped indentations on that desk that I have now inherited, I can recall back before I obtained a laptop, when I would neatly pen letters, only to have the ball point punch through the paper as it rolled over one of those indentations. Had I, like my older brother had a hammer handy, the temptation to add depth, character and numbers to those crescents would have proven irresistible.
In my experience anger rarely corrects injustice, and once the explosion subsides the added unjust results become apparent. And they are never more apparent than in the little things. Like not that long ago:
I hadn’t slept well, I was on a deadline for a foundation grant, my computer kept crashing and when my work finally was done and ready to print, I discovered the printer was out of ink. I was handling the problem sensibly well until I decided to enjoy a cup of coffee for my trip to the store to purchase another ink cartridge. The coffee spilled, scorched, and I jerked up only to crack my head on the cupboard door I inadvertently had left open.
Now the butter had done nothing to me, but suddenly, in a magical transition, it had departed the plate and reappeared in large goblets dripping from the ceiling down onto the cabinets, floor and utensils that had likewise left the security of their drying rack and repositioned themselves across the kitchen floor. Thirty minutes later my clean up ended with me asking forgiveness from the spatula I had used to corral much of the abused butter.
“Ahhh,” to be a Kimball Boy.
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Richard Kimball — Vote Smart Founder
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