Letter From Elba

I know.  I know.  Everyone thinks his kid (or grandkid) says the darndest things.  (A keystone segment of Art Linkletter’s old People Are Funny television show.  And if you’re too young to remember the program, just know that clips of it are cool enough to make it into a Mad Men episode.  Twice.)

We all have cute stories about how precious little Rupert cooed, “I ‘ove you, Gangan,” or how precocious little Amelia could recite the atomic tables as she sat on the potty.

Or how darling Justin- that little dickens- said something naughty in school and his third grade teacher actually collared you on the field trip to the Grove to reprimand you about it.

Hah.  Child’s play.  I’m willing to bet you lunch that my kid said the most embarrassing thing.

Ever.

I’m taking about my son, Nick, of course.  My daughter Natasha was built along Harpo Marx, Marcel Marceau and Teller- of Penn and Teller- specifications.

She never spoke.  She would just pantomime all her more urgent requests.

And when her baby brother was born, she took one glance at him and shot me the dirtiest look on the planet.  “Baby,” she announced accusingly.

And then she shut up.  Not another word crossed her cupid’s bow of a mouth for a solid year.

This silence worried me.

Every night, when I bathed her, I would look her in the eye and carefully enunciate, “I love you.”  And every night, as I felt like Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker, my efforts to get her to repeat my words were met with glacial indifference.

Natasha had no interest in acting like a parrot.  And weeks turned into a year.

I was literally dialing the speech therapist when she strolled in and began to casually recount her two and half year old day.

I hung up stunned.  And grateful that now I could actually hear what had only been “Charades” before.

But Natasha, for all her new-found oratory gifts, would always remain shy, quiet and in fact, in need of a little remedial speech therapy.

(Her speech teacher’s name was Sonia Swenson, and it was my joke that when you could say her name without an hissing sibilant “S” you graduated.)

Nick had Mrs. Swenson, too.  But he was a talking horse of an entirely different stripe.

He was born chatty.

A quick glance at his baby book confirms that soon he was jettisoning common baby talk like “Mama” and “Sashi” and “please” and “cup” for more sophisticated palaver like “Mima, I am up,” and “I want to see Annie on Sunday.”***

*** Nick would die if he read that last request.  Annie?  Really?  But he was only echoing his big sister who loved that show/movie.  No worries, Nick.  You liked Top Gun.

All that chatter was soon followed by his toddler magnum opus- “Throw my macaroni and cheese in the garbage.  I have to call Michael Reese.”

I knew who he was mimicking for sure.  Me- and my volunteer efforts on behalf of the hospital.

And once he found his declarative sentences, there was no stopping him.

Sometimes to my great embarrassment.  To wit…

Nick was crazy about people in wheelchairs.  He called them “Handicaps,” and they thrilled him inexorably.  He thought they were Gobots- half man, half machine.

And he would scream, “Handicap!” at the top of his lungs whenever he was lucky to enough to spot one.  Followed thereupon by a mad dash to check them out further.

I soon learned the drill.

At the battle cry “Handicap!” I would reach down and grab just to prevent a close-up encounter between my thrilled-to-pieces little boy and some poor beleaguered soul already burdened with a problem.

This “grab and detain” system worked perfectly until that fateful day when Nick- about four- and I entered a very small elevator in the Old Orchard Medical Building.  As we made our way down, the car stopped and in wheeled a…

HANDICAP!

As the man rolled in, I took one look at my son’s face and as he drew in all his breath to yell out, I clamped my hand over his mouth and (partially) suffocated him.

By the time we reached the bottom and the guy wheeled away, Nick wasn’t too thrilled with me.  I could see him formulating plans to avoid parental censorship in the future.

He brought his “Free Speech” campaign to church.

Organized Religion Sidebar:  It would take volumes to explain my outlook on religion. I have given the topic a lot of thought since I was a kid.  For brevity’s sake, let’s just say that I wanted my children to think for themselves about the topic. Hence I decided that the Unitarian Church had the least dogma and the most tolerant approach to religion with which I was comfortable.

The Unitarian church in Evanston had a kids’ Sunday School that I thought would be fairly benign.  But before they went off to the class, all the kids sat down in front in the church’s main room and were part of the adult Sunday service.  I was stuck in a pew at the back of the house.

The minister would direct some topics to the children, and one day he opened the floor to religious questions.

My heart sank when I saw five year old Nick get up.  I didn’t know what was coming, but I knew it was going to be good.

“How can Jesus be so famous when he’s dead?” asked my little heretic in round, pear-shaped tones that echoed throughout the nave and transept and stained glass.

The minister looked befuddled, the entire audience roared with laughter, and now I stood up.

“It’s like Elvis,” I hissed.  “I’ll explain it to you later.  Sit down.”

But that’s not my sure-bet thing.

When Nick was about four, he wanted bunk beds.  So I called Colby’s furniture store and ordered a set.

The next week they arrived- along with a man to set them up.  I was housekeeper-less that day, and so I directed him to Nicky’s room myself.  Both Nicky and Natasha were vitally interested in this setting-up arrangement, and thus I asked the man if they could stay in the room and watch him assemble them.

He kindly assented and I left all three of them in Nicky’s room and adjourned to my office down the hall to do some paper work.

From my vantage point, I could hear everything that went on in that room.

The Colby’s guy- a very dignified, gray-at-the-temples gentleman was African-American. (This is not a good way to describe him, btw.  I think he was of the generation that would have said “Negro.”)

But no matter what I call him, I will never forget how kind he was, as he patiently explained to the kids each step as he put together the beds.  I was very impressed.

But just as I was turning back to the work at hand, I heard my little boy say to him, “You’re black, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am, son,” was the answer.

(And it’s the gentle “son” that haunts me even now- thirty years later.  He called my boy “son.”  I’ll never get over that.)

But somewhere a warning bell went off in my head, and somehow an invisible wire pulled me up out of my desk chair and I started to run down the hall just in time to see my son turn to his angelic six year old sister and say…

“He’s black, Natasha.  Let’s shoot him.”

The look of horror on that poor man’s face was matched only by mine.  I’m sure he thought that he was in the home of the Grand Wizard of the Winnetka branch of the KKK. After all, kids learn that stuff at home, right?

I don’t remember what I said to him.  It was so awful that I made no sense whatsoever.

The Colby’s guy was a gentleman about it.  I can only hope he has forgotten the comment by now.  I never will.

I know this story mortifies Nick.  He’s at a loss to explain it himself.  No one is kinder or less prejudiced than he.

But I still stand by my wager.  And if you have something better/worse, feel free to let me know.

Right now I’m feeling pretty confident.

And I’m thinking the chicken hash at RL.

Art Linkletter will never know what he missed.

Back when I worked for the Sun Times’ Pioneer Press, I wrote a weekly humor column called “Social Studies.”  It ran twelve hundred words and it was about the everyday life of the North Shore housewife.

Think Erma Bombeck- only thinner.

I did it for ten years and I loved every minute of it.  My editor, Dorothy Andries, was the kindest lady on the planet, and more importantly, she left me alone.

“You’re the one person I never have to worry about,” she’d tell me at our annual lunch Boss/Ross meeting.  “I never have to edit you. You always know what not to say.”

It was true.  I did know my job description- and my audience- to a tee. I scrupulously self-edited and I always steered clear of thorny topics like politics and religion.

My column was strictly G rated.  And that was fine by me.  I still had all the freedom of my imagination.

And to that end I wrote one act plays, fake horoscopes, phony wedding announcements, epistles, ersatz Christmas newsletters from the long-suffering Shumway family and ruthlessly mined my own life for anecdotes and incidents.

Nora Ephron’s mother, Phoebe, had set out my mantra years before.

“Everything’s copy,” she had declared and I faithfully hued to that party line.  (And I have a gigantic box filled with ten years of tear sheets to prove it.)

And people really liked the column.  Sometimes, they’d tell me, it was the very first thing they read in their Winnetka Talk or Glencoe News or Evanston Review.

(Not me.  The first thing I read was “Police Blotter.”  It was always fun to see which one of my friends or old classmates had just gotten a DUI or had been caught shoplifting.)

And because my photograph ran above the byline, I became a very minor celebrity on the North Shore.  (Emphasis on the “minor.”)  People would recognize me and stop me in the store or at the gas station to tell me how much they liked what I wrote.

It was very gratifying to me.  But it always mortified my daughter, shy Natasha- if she happened to be with me.  Her reaction to these close encounters never varied.  She’d squirm, glower, and eye roll.

And heaven forfend if any of these nice people ever addressed the fatal- yet inevitable- question to her: “What’s it like to have such a funny mother?  Is she always funny at home?”

“Not funny at all,” she’d snap as she’d pull on my arm and whine, “Come on, Mom. Let’s go.”

(Later both my kids learned to tell people, “Don’t believe everything you read.”  They knew darn well that I took liberal license with the truth- especially about them.)

But when she was young, these meet-ups embarrassed the living daylights out of her. But I enjoyed them. It was swell knowing that what I did made people happy.

And once in awhile, I would get a fan letter to that effect- sent the old-fashioned way to me via the Pioneer Press headquarters.  As I only went into the office once a month to drop off my copy (ah, those low tech days before email) Dorothy would save them up and hand them to me when I showed up.

These letters were great.

Hearing from total strangers that you made them laugh, or think, or better yet, they had torn you out and sent you to their mother-in-law, or stuck you up in a prominent place on their refrigerator door, always made my day.

I got letters from other columnists, too.  Bob Greene, Michael Medved and Roger Ebert all wrote to tell me that they had given “thumbs up” to something I had to say.  Terrific.

It may seem like bragging now, but back then, it was the only real validation I had telling me that my peers felt strongly enough to take the time out of their day to pass on a compliment.

But fan letters from the not-so-famous moved me equally.  And I want to share with you my all-time favorite missive.

It came from a member in good standing of Wilmette, Illinois’s Avoca School’s third grade class.  Mrs. Hayden was Natasha’s teacher (and later, Nick’s) and she had a lovely tradition of inviting each parent to bring a favorite book and read aloud to her class.

The roster went alphabetically and toward the end of the year it was my turn. Natasha couldn’t really object to my guest star appearance.  She surrendered to the fact that all the other parents had come in and read something.  She would bravely soldier on somehow through my turn.

I gave my assignment plenty of thought and, finally, I came up with my selection.

It was Champion Dog Prince Tom by Jean Fritz and Tom Clute. I chose it because its true story of a little blond cocker spaniel who captured both obedience and field trial championships had enchanted me as a kid.  And the adorable illustrations by Ernest Hart were sure to wow a third grade class.

Not to mention I still had my original 1958 Weekly Reader version from which to read.

On the day, I headed into class and read the time-allotted sample of the book- not forgetting to hold the pages open at the captivating illustrations.

The third graders oohed and aahed appropriately.  I had chosen wisely, and even Natasha was pleased with the results.

I went home in a fine mood- which was reinforced a week later when a packet of letters arrived.

Everyone in the class had written me a thank you note.  (The class’s best penman had been recruited to tell me this in a beautiful Palmer cursive cover letter that was on the top of the pile.)

I read each one with pleasure.  Some of the artier of the kids had even enclosed drawings of me holding up the book or of Prince Tom himself.

The notes were terrific and I loved them all.  However one has stood out after all these years.

“Dear Mrs. Ross,” it said.  “You were very good.  I was absent.”

Ah.  How sweet is success.

Even Natasha would have to agree.