Book of Days

I am not known for my powers of memory, but the paradox to that is I am known for remembering the finest details of the strangest things. Like the time when I was a little boy, probably no more than four years old; it was me and my whole family, my parents, my sister, my grandparents, in the basement of our house in Valley Stream, and it was a Sunday, and I’m pretty sure I wanted to go to Nunley’s, the amusement park that was not all that far away. “No, Johnny,” I was told, “we’ll go some other day.” But I heard it as, “We’ll go some Mother’s Day,” and I always thought that some Mother’s Day we’d go to Nunley’s.

As it turns out, we never did go to Nunley’s on a Mother’s Day, though we did go plenty of times outside of Mother’s Day. My favorite ride was the track car ride. Going to Nunley’s was probably a lot more fun for me than it was for anyone else in the family (though they were all pretty good at Skee-Ball compared to me). But these are some of the things you do when you have kids: you do what you can to make them happy, even if it means setting them down in a kid-size slot car that has not one but two steering wheels and watching them as their little car motors around the wooden track, waving at them as they watch you. It seems I was always watching my folks while the car drove me around; I was never watching the road (it’s a good thing those cars were on tracks), although I am pretty sure my hands were always somewhere on the wheel.

And so today it is Mother’s Day, and we remember all that our mothers have done for us. We honor them, our mothers given and our mothers chosen, for sometimes there are more than one in our lives. It does take a village, as the saying goes, to raise good children. And so I think of my mother, and my grandmother, and my sister, who all were part of the raising of the me that was a little boy. I hope I was not too much of a handful. It is a job that comes, at times, with little thanks. Like the time I barfed in the car on the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut. Mom took care of that. It was not a pleasant task, but she did it, because when we are small we are not very capable and our moms know this and they look out for us and they take care of all that is not right so that it is, eventually, right again. To all of our mothers on this Mother’s Day: Thank you. A thousand blessings upon you all.

Image: The track car ride at Nunley’s Amusement Park in Baldwin, New York, circa 1960. That’s not me in the picture but ten years later it could’ve been me. Look closely and you’ll see the two steering wheels in each car. The amusement park closed in 1995. Its historic carousel was saved and relocated to Garden City, New York, where it now is part of the Cradle of Aviation Museum. The rest of the rides and amusements were dismantled and sold off piecemeal. They say that now there’s a Pep Boys on the site of Nunley’s, there on Sunrise Highway in Baldwin. So in a way, it’s still about cars. The last time I was there was probably about 1976; it wasn’t long after that that we up and moved away to South Florida.

Seth and I keep this picture prominently displayed in our living room. It’s a photograph of Seth and his two sisters, circa 1975. Seth is the one on the floor, throwing a tantrum. Thompson Family legend states that this scene was the usual state of affairs in the house. This legend, accompanied by its photographic documentation, is a very big part of our decision not to have kids of our own, be they our own “biokids” (as Dan Savage calls them in his book The Kid) or adopted kids. The chances that our own kids would put us through the same misery that Seth’s parents had to endure is a risk neither of us is prepared to take.

I look at this picture sometimes and I think, “God bless Doreen.” Doreen is Seth’s mom. She was surprised with twins right on the heels of her first born child, and one of those twins was Seth. Seth, for the record, turned out to be quite a great guy. But certainly God bless Doreen and while we’re at it, God bless all the moms. Their job is not an easy one.

Perhaps Anna Jarvis was a challenging child, too. It was Anna who championed the idea of Mother’s Day and in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson, at Anna’s urging, designated the Second Sunday of May as an official holiday honoring our mothers. Anna, however, did not approve of what Mother’s Day quickly became: another big retail holiday. So if you want to keep to the traditional Anna Jarvis spirit of Mother’s Day, you’d do well to simply visit or call your mom and spend the day with her. That’s all Anna wanted the day to be.

Then again, if you put your mother through the things that Seth put his through, you might consider buying her a new car.

I love finding the disjunction in things: you know, what is it about something, anything, that is not quite right? It is often finding the disjunction that leads to really understanding a great painting, for instance, or offers some new insight into a poem or a story. And this may be at the heart of what I love about seasonal celebrations, because they are chock full of disjunction, mostly coming out of a church appropriating an old pagan holiday while the people cling stubbornly to their old ways, even centuries later.

But here we are with Mother’s Day, a benign enough holiday to be sure, a secular one, created only one century ago. In fact, this year marks the official 100th anniversary of Mother’s Day in this country. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson designated the Second Sunday of May as an official holiday recognizing our mothers. Behind Woodrow Wilson’s action was Anna Jarvis, a West Virginia woman whose life was consumed by Mother’s Day. Anna Jarvis championed the establishment and recognition of the holiday with great passion. But once the day was out of the box, as it were, it took on a life of its own. By 1920, Mother’s Day was already far too commercial for Anna, and she spent the rest of her life militantly fighting that commercialism. So, what do you do with a problem like Anna Jarvis?

Mother’s Day has its roots in the 1850s when Jarvis’s mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, organized women’s groups to aid in the Civil War, on both sides, both Union and Confederate. She called them Mother’s Day Work Clubs. After Ann’s passing in 1905, her daughter Anna sought to memorialize her mother with the idea that each person would honor their own mother, too. She did this in Philadelphia on May 10, 1908. She was living there in Philadelphia, but Mother’s Day was also observed that year at a little church in Grafton, West Virginia, where Anna was raised, that same day. Anna began making the observance of Mother’s Day her life’s work, and she was a great success at it. It took only six years more before Mother’s Day was being celebrated nationally.

But Anna soon came to despise her creation. Florists, candy shops, and a burgeoning greeting card industry were all quick to jump on the Mother’s Day bandwagon, and nothing irritated Anna Jarvis more. In her eyes, Mother’s Day was a day to go home and spend with your mom. Plain and simple. Anything more than that was sacrilege and she grew more and more adamant about this as the years progressed. She organized boycotts and public demonstrations and she was even arrested once or twice for disturbing the peace after crashing trade shows touting Mother’s Day gifts. Anna fought the commercialization of Mother’s Day with every last penny of her rather large inheritance, and she died broke and probably insane in 1948 at a Philadelphia sanitarium. One can picture her last words, as she struggled for air, being something about Mother’s Day. It’s a safe bet, I’d say, that they were.

I used to work for Hallmark, back when my heart was two sizes too small, and the fact is that Mother’s Day sales account for more greeting cards sold than any other holiday save Christmas and Valentine’s Day. It is one of the more impossible days to get a good table at a restaurant. Does your mother expect these things? I don’t know. If your mother is like my mother, she is probably saying, “Please, no gifts. I have enough stuff. Just come spend the day with me.” Certainly we all have enough stuff. Why burden your mother with more? All that Anna Jarvis (and most likely your mother, too) asks is that you go pay your mother a visit. Anna will smile upon you if you do, and so will your mother.

Image: That’s me and my mom, waiting patiently for something good… And in the next frame a birthday cake appears before us. It was my second birthday.