My mama recently came to New York City.
Talk about panic.
New York City isn’t any place for a genteel Southern lady like my mama to be gallivanting around. No sir.
My mother is elegant, soft-spoken, and so beautiful that most people can’t believe she is old enough to have a 24-year-old son. And lest you think I’m bragging, well . . . I can brag because, hey, she’s my mama.
Mother is a musician. Shoot, when I was little, I thought everyone’s mother could play the piano, violin, cello, oboe, recorder, and harmonica. I thought everyone’s mother could sing Mozart’s “Giunse Alfin Il Momento.”
Mother and I had big times when I was little. She would help me sing Mr. Roger’s tunes (which she hated). She let me lick the cake batter. One time she even put chocolate milk in my Froot Loops. Now that’s spoiled.
I must tell you, it’s tough to go from spoiled to on-your-own in New York City. So maybe I’m a mama’s boy. You would be too, if your mother could cook pork chops like mine. What the world needs is a few more southern mothers who can cook a mean pork chop.
So naturally I was thrilled when my mother managed to come up for a visit last month.
But this presented a small problem. Actually, it presented about 47 problems. I’m a bachelor, you see, and my apartment is well, uh, ah. I guess you could say it lacks a woman’s touch. Of course, in it’s condition before my mother arrived, I doubt any woman would want to touch it, period.
First, I bought some tissue. Women seem to appreciate having that stuff around. Men just use toilet paper to blow their nose, but for some reason women want it in a box. So I got some.
Then I bought paint. Paint does wonders for covering up dust and beer and all that junk that sticks to walls after you’ve made a spaghetti dinner. Down in Alabama, it’s easy to buy paint. You just run down to the hardware store and pick some up. But here in New York, paint is outlawed in many forms because the hoodlums run around painting subways and public landmarks with it.
So I ended up having to purchase “Ralph Lauren Decorator Paint.” Uhg. It was tough to pick out a color, too. My choices were “Dylan’s Grove” and “Veranda Periwinkle.” Only Ralph Lauren could come up with names like that.
I bought three gallons of Veranda Periwinkle and spent a week painting my entire apartment with it. After I was done, I realized I’d painted my home purple. It wasn’t purple on the chip. It wasn’t purple in the can. It wasn’t even purple when it was wet. But brother it was purple on the walls. My apartment looks like a giant eggplant.
After a good week of bleaching, scrubbing, scraping, and such, my apartment was in order (flowers helped cover up that dirty-sock smell). But there was no cleaning up New York. How was I going to cover up all that obscene graffiti? How was I going to make everybody behave? Taking one’s mother into New York is akin to watching “Showgirls” with your Aunt Agnes. The best thing is to cover your eyes when you get to the scandalous part and hope that your Aunt Agnes’ vision is failing.
But mother got along up here okay. Oh sure, there were a couple of fiascos: trying to get her three tons of luggage up five flights of stairs; forgetting the keys to the apartment; forgetting the tickets to the show we went to, etc. Maybe Mama was a bit shocked that my apartment is only ten feet wide and very purple. And I guess the 3 million drunks that were celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day might have been a bit worrisome.
On the whole however, we had the times of our lives together–just me and Mama. Perhaps it was because we couldn’t take our time together for granted.
So Andalusia, whether you live 5 miles or 5 days from your mama, don’t forget to tell her you love her. And if you happen to write a column for her hometown newspaper, do it in print.
—Morgan Murphy