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Retirement Talk for Boomers, Seniors, and Retirees

Frog Spit

Jackie Spinks
 

                                                            Chapter Fourteen

           During the thirties, part of the housewife’s job description included worry.  Wives were appointed as official worries in the family.  Of course, the big worry was money, but that worry was equally allotted.  All the other worries were the property of wives and mothers.

           And only work, it at all, brought any surcease from worry.  The day before pay-day, it was worry about whether we could afford a bottle of milk or loaf of bread, as she’d already sent me to the store multiple times and worried saying, “Charge it” again would be the last straw for this week. Mama would search through the bread drawer for  crusts of bread that hadn’t mildewed and then soak the bread in water to soften it up.

           “Hmmm, hmmm, good!”  She’d smack her lips to reassure our frowning deliberation.  “It’s milk toast, without a lot of milk.”

           Sometimes, I think to keep this big one (money) at bay, Mama would worry about things that didn’t need to be worried about.  She’d worry when she opened a jar or can of vegetables, that the jar or can hadn’t gone “pfft” when she opened it. As much of the stuff had been canned by Mama, had she really sealed it tight, or did it harbor botulisms?

           “Did you hear it go pfft,” she’d inquire of us?

           “Nope.”

           “Maybe, I should throw it out, then.  I didn’t hear it go “pfft” either.”
           “It’s okay, Mama.  I heard it go “pfft.”  I wasn’t paying attention to what you said.”  Wasting a whole can of food to assuage Mama’s worry wasn’t our idea of financial acumen.

           “You’re sure.”

           “Yeah.”

Mama, apart from her worry about us getting TB which wet feet were a progenitor to, also worried about lock-jaw, blood poisoning and St. Vitus Dance.

 And although I remember friends getting scarlet fever, she never worried about that-- nor diphtheria, pneumonia, dementia (which was referred to as being in your “second childhood”), whooping cough, rheumatic fever, meningitis, or diabetes (it was believed only extremely thin, old people got diabetes).  All of the above harbored by someone in our extended family at one time or other.  Those were common diseases in our neck of the woods and nothing you could do about them.

           So Mama never worried about them and while TB was the baton twirler that led her parade of worries, some of the others besides the threesome-- blood poisoning, lock jaw, and St. Vitus Dance--and elephantiasis (after she saw some pictures in National Geographic) were worries.  Maybe it was the mysterious diseases that worried her.

           Then Mama read everyone in the world carried the tubercle bacillus and after that decided with such a magnitude of popularity, TB was nothing to worry about, so she stopped evaluating every cough, worrying if it was a precursor to TB. 

           If it came it came. 

           Mama had a good excuse for the absence of desserts, which we seldom had.  It was that sugar diabetes, (called sugar diabetes in the thirties) was believed to be the result of  a sweet tooth. 

           If my uncle offered me a chocolate candy, Mama said, “no.”

           “I don’t care if I do get sugar diabetes.” I protested later.

           “Well, I do.  And I don’t want even Wilfred to think I can’t buy my kids their own candy.”  (Maybe in the end, it all boiled down to pretending we had more money than we did.)

           She worried about dirt, dampness, diarrhea, divorce (people should know which side their bread was buttered on) and disrespect for authority.  Strikers were okay; it was kid’s disrespect for adults that worried her.

           “What’s the world coming to,” she’d worry to Daddy, when she heard about some kids vandalizing the high school.

           She worried if Daddy had locked the door, turned out the lights or if his spending money on a trip or bicycle for my brother was a foolish extravagance.

           She worried that I’d get spelled down in a spelling bee.  She’d coach me every morning on the words. 

           She worried I might get a bad reputation and then what would the relatives think?  At ten I was hardly a candidate for a reputation, but then one can never start too early, pointing out the hazard of the world when a woman had a bad reputation.

           “No man will marry you,” Mama exclaimed.

           “I don’t care.  I’m not getting married,” I replied.

           ‘But nobody will want to associate with you and you’ll be all alone with your bad reputation.”

           That one stopped me. 

           “Let me too you,” Mama said, “I know about those things.”

           Before I’d go to school she’d warn me, “Watch when you cross the street.”

           The street I had to cross was a gravel road wherein a Model-A ricocheted down about once every hour, occasionally spewing gravel, which we also had to watch for, so we wouldn’t get hit.  The only kind of wrecks we ever heard of were side swipes of two cars trying to pass one another on the narrow roads that were once cow trails.

           When my brother started school, I was told, “Take your brother’s hand when you cross the street.”

           “Mama!” we both hated holding hands.

           “Do as you’re told and look both ways before you cross.”

           She feared public toilets more than murder, believing them to be the breeding ground for a multitude of unnamed, shameful diseases.

           Mama would have preferred incurable congestive heart failure to a curable infection like gonorrhea.  Shame prioritized death.  The world was so dangerous the best place to stay was safely home, preferably in bed.  We, kids went to bed at seven and arose at seven.  And, for further safety, associated only with the relatives. 

           Mama commented that with her poor health and the vicissitudes of this dangerous world she’d never live beyond forty.  She lived into her nineties.

           And although she had enough worries to choke a rhinoceros, her worry never caused her to hyperventilate or to have nervous lip-twitching, fist-clenching, spasmodic panic attacks that I’ve seen worries exhibit today.

           Mama never admitted to anyone that she had been dunked in a lake and made a Mormon until old age when Mormonism became acceptable, even fashionable.  She said when she was a kid she was called, “Mormon, moron” and Piggy Polygi.”  At first she couldn’t speak English and smiled when they called her names, but Wil, who was older caught on and told her what they were saying. 

           She said Mormons were looked down upon, made fun of, considered dumb because they believed Joseph Smith was a prophet, and all those other prophets like Peter, Paul and John were legit because you couldn’t check up on these guys, while some Mormons had ancestors who knew Joseph Smith personally. 

           We were sent to a Sunday school a few blocks from the house mostly to get rid of us on Sunday morning, although I don’t think the Sunday school was Mormon.

           I worried about God.  I thought of Him as a more omnipotent parent waiting to finger me when I misstepped, but considered Him as a poor source of wish fulfillment. Mama said we should pray for others, but we couldn’t figure out why those others couldn’t pray for themselves.  Why did we have to do it?  Nevertheless, I prayed for the starving kids in India.  The starving kids in America were never talked about.  But as kids from India continued to starve I decided that line was going nowhere- and I quit. 

           Brother said he prayed that Daddy would get a good job and Mama would get invited to a WCTU party and when it happened he claimed it was his prays that saved the family from the streets and from social ostracism and that he was a favorite of God’s. Figured Brother, being a boy, had an inside track.

           Anyhow, I stopped praying and worrying about anyone.  Sometimes I think Mama worried because she wanted reassurance, all would be well.  At her peak of worry, she’d visit her sisters, and in the jargon of their secret society, sliding back and forth from English into Swedish, the coven would worry together.

           And after freely practicing this skill at despair and anticipating morbidity, refreshed, they’d sally forth and head for home, put on their aprons, wax the floors, scrub the tile with a tooth brush and iron clothes.  One thing they knew for sure, if something horrible happened to one of us and they needed to call and ambulance or mortician nobody would ever say their home wasn’t clean.

           The only thing that could blank out all other worries was the greater worry about money.  When Mama would get her purse and part with a nickel for me to run to the store for a loaf of day-old bread, she’d part with it as reluctantly as a king giving up his throne.

           “Scrimp and save!  Scrimp and save!  That’s all I’m good for,” she’d lament before she handed over the nickel.

           Daddy worried about money, too.  But other than worrying about getting a job, losing the one he had-- or the car breaking down and he didn’t have the money to buy the part to fix it, and as a result couldn’t get to work, or at least to work on time, he never worried.  Worry was Mama’s job.  Yeah, life wasn’t that Rosie for women either. 

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