I (wish I didn’t) Remember Mama: Mom, the Environmentalist

What are the three R’s for saving the environment? Recycle, reuse, and reduce. There’s a fourth R and it’s my favorite—repurpose. I enjoy finding new uses for standard items—or even not-so-standard items. I found so many uses for clothes pins that I wrote an article about it, but my fear of rejection kept me from sending it out to magazines (in the old days, before everyone could be a writer on the internet).

I suspect that my ability to envision new uses for everyday items is part of the nature/nurture controversy. Am I genetically inclined to be inventive, or was I reared in an environment that encouraged creativity? For some reason, the key to this puzzle lies in a story that I’ve found very difficult to write, although it’s been told many times.

I’ve always liked cast iron fry pans, especially for pan-broiling steaks. You throw a little salt on the seasoned pan, and a little on top of the steak, and—if it’s a good steak, and you eat meat—it’s almost as good as cooking on the grill (if you like that sort of thing. Isn’t life just full of ifs?). I may be inventive, but outside of random, obvious thoughts like using them for paperweights or doorstops, I’ve never come up with a clever use for cast iron pots and pans (other than cooking in them, which can be quite clever). My mother, on the other hand…what a wiz!

One afternoon, my mother was on her knees on the kitchen floor, pulling a cast iron frying pan out from the bottom shelf of the floor to ceiling closet my father built for her (or more specifically, for her cookware). That was one beautiful closet, as anyone who’s ever lived in cramped spaces with inadequate storage could tell you. So there was Mumsy, pulling out the frying pan, but also engaged in a “conversation” with her only daughter (that would be me). By conversation, I mean she was yelling and I was standing there taking it. Since I don’t recall any action that prompted the vitriol, it must have been another one of those litanies of all my character flaws.

She pulled out the large frying pan for which she had been searching, and slammed it against the floor so hard that it broke in half, leaving a large dent in the kitchen floor. Were that not shocking enough, she screamed, “I wish that was your head!”

Here’s my question, she wishes which was my head—the floor or the frying pan? Either way, it doesn’t give a warm feeling. My mother was not a large woman; she stood about 5’ tall and did not spend any time at the gym. I doubt I could break an iron pan, no matter what the size, so I also wonder what fury drove the woman.

When people asked about my mother, I probably told this story more than any other. For most of my life I thought it was pretty funny—I mean how many kids had mothers this nuts? As I got older, I began to wonder if it could possibly have happened the way I remember it. Could any kid’s mother be that nuts?

About eight years ago, brother J. and I reunited after about 18 years of not communicating. We weren’t angry; we just didn’t have anything to say. From him, I’ve learned things about my parents that I had never known. I also learned that he had witnessed that scene in the kitchen. It seems he also thought this story was amusing, but when he shared it with someone else, she posited “Why do you think that’s funny?” I guess you had to be there…

Okay, it isn’t funny in the ha-ha-hilarity kind of way or even the carload-of-clowns way; for us, it’s funny in the how-bizarre-is-this way. I suspect I’ve found this story difficult to write because there is no way I can replicate the intensity and drama of that moment in words on a screen. As I said, you had to be there…