Sunday, June 24, 2007 | 7:10 a.m.
They say mom always knows best, and that was certainly the case in our household as I was growing up, even when I vehemently disagreed with her. With the passage of time, I understand more each year how everything she said was designed to somehow keep my mug off post office walls and keep me on a relatively straight path in life.
My late mother had several pet sayings that she would utter so often they are still earning compound interest in my memory bank.
One of her favorites was this daily complaint: "It seems like all I do is walk around this house turning out lights."
Having grown up dirt poor, she felt that leaving a light on without a person in the room was criminally wasteful. To this day, I find myself turning out lights even when someone is sitting under one reading a book. It's a hard habit to shake.
Then there were those universal lines that must be a requisite for graduation from Mother School. We've all heard variations on them:
Of course there was her very favorite, usually uttered as she was reading the morning paper, as you're doing right now: On reading a particularly distressing article, she'd say, "I swear, the world is going to hell in a hand basket."
There's never a time when I'm reading the newspaper and I encounter an article about human depravity, or outright negligence or stupidity, that I don't hear my mother's favorite saying as though she were sitting across the breakfast table, and wonder just how the entire globe would fit into that small a container.
If she had lived in Las Vegas as I have for more than 30 years, my mother's hell-in-a-hand-basket count would be well into the thousands. Certainly every time she read about another county commissioner selling out taxpayers, she would have uttered it. Even before the crimes were reported, she would have questioned the necessity of raising more than a million dollars in campaign contributions to run for a position that is supposed to be about serving the public.
Any public official who lined his or her pockets would have been, in her words, "consigned to their own special place in hell." The same would apply to any teacher who crossed the line physically with a student, although this seemed to happen far less in her day than the present or perhaps it was just not reported as frequently.
Although Mom was not a sports fan, she heard so much blather about sports and celebrated athletes from my dad and me that she surely would have had an opinion about Barry Bonds, and any other jocks who break the rules to gain unfair advantage. She would have uttered something like, "He thinks he's getting away with it, but God knows what he's doing and he'll pay later."
One time a golf score that I shot in a tournament was recorded in the newspaper as being one stroke lower than the scorecard I turned in. Although no cheating had taken place and it was simply a typographical error, she had me phone the newspaper and ask that it correct the score the following day. The man who answered my call on the sports desk told me that because the typo didn't affect the tournament outcome, there was no call for a correction. But he had a sudden change of heart after my mother grabbed the phone and asked him if accuracy had any importance to his newspaper. He quickly decided that it did and the correct score was reported the next day.
Another time she waited up for me when I celebrated too hard with some friends during my senior year of high school. She videotaped my slurring excuses when I stumbled home that night, and played the tape for our entire family the next evening. That was one instance when pictures spoke volumes and she didn't need to add another word. (David Hasselhoff, I feel your pain.)
When I think of how often my mother's sense of decency and propriety was violated back in the 1950s and '60s, I shudder how she would react to the news that is force-fed to us today. The scourge of methamphetamine in our valley, the prevalence of car theft, and the blatant billboards and hooker pamphlets passed out freely along the Strip would surely have had her beckoning our family back to the Northwest, where she could insulate her grandchildren from all the corruption and decadence.
She would have been resistant to hearing how meth abuse was even more prevalent in Washington state, and how our stomping grounds of Spokane and Seattle had for some odd reason bred more serial killers than any other area of the country. My mother was born and raised up there, lived there her entire 78 years, and like any good and loyal native, she didn't put up with much bashing about her home turf.
All of this is a way of explaining why I tell our young children, at least twice a day, "Ask your mother. She'll know."
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