This is a small piece from a book I've written over 40 plus years that I call the Brown and White. I look at it as a great Catholic story although a publisher I wrote one time called it "commercial fiction." I may not be promoting Catholicism in the work, but it is very Catholic in a visceral sense. This part is based on my mother--who is now 97, and no longer knits or drinks, but she still is a great inspiration in both humor and human kindness.
Once I am off to Mount Saint Mary’s every day, my mother’s influence in my life wanes. I am 20 miles away with hundreds of other boys and a male faculty. When I get home, I eat and then hit the books. There is no walking home for lunch with my mother like grade school and most of the best stories from school are too rough to tell her. Life changed that fast.
Nevertheless, my mother is always trying in some way to make life better for me. She is not like some mothers looking to control me; she is honestly trying to make a contribution, even if it does not always work out so well.
I come home one day and my mother meets me at the door – she is overjoyed.
“I was talking to Mrs. Halloran on Talman and she told me that she has a neighbor whose son went to Mount Saint Mary’s and she has a school letterman’s jacket, you know the very expensive ones with leather sleeves. She says it is like brand new and the boy no longer needs it” My mother gloats.
“I don’t know Mom, wouldn’t this guy want his jacket even after he is out of high school? “ I ask.
“Oh no, this kid is on to Loyola University, he isn’t going to be wearing a High School jacket.” She returned.
“OK, Mom, but please let Mrs. Halloran know that I don’t want it if the guy’s mother is taking it away from him.” I said.
A week or so later on a Saturday morning, Mrs. Halloran is at the door delivering what looks like a brand new Mount Saint Mary Jacket. It is beautiful and it actually fits. It is dark brown with tan leather sleeves and it looks just like the new ones that some of my buddies have bought. I cannot believe my luck. I wear it around the house for a few minutes and then put it into a closet thinking about how great it will be to have it for Monday.
A short time later the phone rangs and as usual my mother answers.
“Hello, oh yes Mrs. Halloran he loves it. And thanks so much, we could have never been able to afford it.” My mother looks over at me and smiles while waiting for Mrs. Halloran to speak.
“Oh really,” my mother says as she gets this pained look on her face. “That’s awful. That’s just awful.”
I immediately know the too-good-to-be-true jacket is too good to be true. I make it easy on my mother and go over the closet and carry the coat over on a hanger and hand it to her. She looks half disappointed and half surprised that I have sensed what was going on.
“Well, all right then, I guess it can’t be helped. Well, no, we wouldn’t want it under those conditions.” She says and then hangs up the phone.
All the air is out of my mother’s sail when she says:
“Mrs. Halloran’s neighbor screwed things up. Her son had already promised the jacket to his girlfriend’s brother who is going to Mount Saint Mary’s next year. But, the good news is that she said she knows someone else who may have one.”
A few minutes later, Mrs. Halloran came over and took away the beautiful jacket. After she left, I said,
“Jeez Mom, maybe we should have taken a picture of me with the jacket. I could have cut out some letters on paper and pasted them on for the photo! “
She laughed a little, but it was a painful moment for both us. We both knew we’d never have the money for jacket like that. Life goes on and ten minutes later, it didn’t mean a thing. In my house material possessions were never a priority.
A few days later, my mother got another phone call from Mrs. Halloran.
“Hello, oh yes Mrs. Halloran. Oh really. Well that sounds nice, yes. Oh it does? Oh I see. Well thanks so much again. Yes, I’ll be home. Great. Good bye.
My mother turns to me and says:
“She got another one from someone else. She says it’s a little older than the other one, but still has plenty of wear.”
Before I saw the jacket, I knew what I was in for. When I saw the jacket the next day after coming home from school, I was surprised. It didn’t look like a jacket another student had worn while attending Mount Saint Mary’s, it looked like a jacket everyone who had ever attended Mount Saint Mary’s had worn. The dark brown that made up the body of the coat had a grayish hue to it, like it had been stored for a thousand years in a pyramid. The tan arms had so many wrinkles and deep creases that it looked more like elephant skin than leather. It was an ancient hideous thing and on top of everything, it was a couple sizes small.
But of course, it became my Mount Saint Mary’s jacket and I wore it all the time.
After successfully acquiring my jacket, my mother got even more ambitious in her determination to dress me for success at Mount Saint Mary. She knitted things for me.
One day, I came home from School and there was my mother, busy at work, knitting away. I had never seen my mother knitting, but there she was, having at it like nobody’s business. And again, I knew I was in trouble immediately because she had two big balls of yarn: one white and the other brown. What could she be knitting in Mount Saint Mary colors I thought.
“So Mom, what are you knitting?” I ask.
“Well I have a few things in mind, you’ll have to see, you’ll have to see.” She says.
“But, I didn’t know you could knit.” Says I.
“Oh, I did lots of it when your Father and I were first married, but I got awful tired of it, so I put it aside for 20 years or so.” She returns.
Well, she’ll be practicing on me no doubt I said to myself as I walked out of the room. I went to the back porch which was a heatless space that my brother and I had commandeered as a bedroom because of its proximity to the kitchen. I opened an old wooden wardrobe that my Uncle Ed had acquired from a hotel and I hung up my coat. Our house was tiny and amounted to a series of small rooms. The master bedroom was about the size of a walk-in closet and it was located just off the living room. The place was so small that if my father sat on his bed and left the bedroom door open, he could carry on a conversation with any of us sitting on the couch without raising his voice. A second bedroom was off the dining room and it was even smaller because a large chimney for the oil furnace ran through it.
Although our carpets were threadbare and our furniture was junk, my mother was a good housewife. The house was as always clean as a whistle, but she had no passion for baking, sewing, or any of the crafts that attract many women. What my mother liked to do best of all was curl up on the couch at night, watch TV with a book in her hand, sip on her beer and smoke a few cigarettes. She liked to watch sitcoms and dramas during the prime time hours. Most of the TV shows were so insipid that she could read her book and still keep track of the various show plots. She read through mysteries faster than Perry Mason could solve them. We respected the fact that evening was her “time off” as she called it.
So we were all surprised to see my mother take up knitting and continue it every night. It kept her hands so busy she couldn’t smoke or have her evening beer. We secretly thought that maybe a priest who was trying to be very practical had given my mother a knitting assignment as penance, but my brother reminded us that we had never seen my mother near a confessional. If she did go, I suspect she would have said to the priest, you tell me yours and then I’ll tell you mine.
At first, my mother produced a pair of white mittens, but I dodged a bullet when she announced that these were for my little sister. The mittens were actually very serviceable, but High School guys just didn’t wear mittens, so I was relieved. She handed them over to my little sister and said: “You are next Collin.”
“Lucky bastard” I thought to myself. I could feel my stomach turn with nervousness at the thought of what I might be required to wear.
Clickety click click, every night for hours; the knitting went on. During the second week, she started to pace herself a little so she could have a little beer as she worked. So the cadence changed to clickety click click sip sip, at times. A few days into that second week she worked in a few cigarettes. So the cadence changed to clickety click click, sip sip, clickety click click wooo aaah. My mother was a master at adaptability.
I could see my mother was making great progress on something long and narrow, but I wasn’t sure what it was. Strips that she would sew together for a blanket? One day when I came home she had switched to what looked like something much smaller and round so my theory on the blanket went out the window.
Finally, one day when I came home, my mother proudly handed me a brown beret and a long brown and white scarf: the perfect companions to my jacket. For a few seconds, I could see my entire life pass before me. I thought this is it, no one will ever see me as an acceptable “hard ass” any longer and I will not likely survive a day with this outfit. I looked into my mom’s eyes and I could see all the love she had put into the knitting and knew in an instant, that regardless of my fate, she had done great.
“Jeez Mom, this is really great stuff, really the best. This is perfect Mom.” I said and I meant it in a way. She looked at me and she put the beret on and lovingly wrapped the scarf around my neck.
Again, like the jacket, once the cold weather hit, I wore the scarf and the beret every day—they had grown on me that much. And for some reason because it was Mount Saint Mary’s, where the guys seem to think a little differently than the rest of the world, my outfit was just fine.
The only odd thing was that the scarf seemed to have a beanstalk sort of quality about it. In no time at all it started to stretch and grow longer each day I wore it. At first, I could wear it around my neck and it hung down to my belt. Then it got longer and I had to wind it round my neck once lest it extend too far down beyond my coat length. Then I had to wrap it round my neck two full turns. As the winter wore on, I was looping it around my arms under my coat and finally I had to wrap it a few times around my waste. As the length of the scarf grew of course, the width shrank. One day toward the end of the winter it fell on the floor outside my locker as I was getting ready to go home. Hanni, who had a locker next to mine, looked down at it and said:
“Jezus Callaghan, what the hell are you doing with a rope in your locker – going to use it to escape some day out the window during Latin Class?”
“No Hannie, I am going to lasso one of the Academy girls as we pass by them on the bus and get myself a date.”
Copyright Sporting Chance Press
This story is taken from The Brown and White.
