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By Mark Bivens
If there’s a support group that needs to be formed it should be for people who don’t know what to do for Mother’s Day. I’d join.
My sister, Jerry Hyde, known around Arkansas as a golfer and some sort of big wheel with the Arkansas Golf Association, once told me to quit worrying about Mom. Mom’s only 80. “She’s a tank,” Jerry said. Mom is helping raise grandchildren now — sort of. She’s hardly ever alone. That’s good. Kids come in handy on a farm in a place called Half Moon in northeast Arkansas. I take some responsibility for Mom being a “tank.” Raising me, in most people’s minds, wasn’t easy. After that, anything seemed easy. It hardened her. Mom pretty much ran the household. In her 30s she began buying up a lot of real estate in what was a prosperous town of 30,000 people. My summers were mainly spent painting and doing yard work on the houses that had become vacant. That happened a lot. The town had an Air Force base and many, if not most, of the tenants she rented to were military people. Some stayed a year or maybe two. Then they’d be transferred. That’s when the rental houses would become a family nightmare. There seems to be an unwritten law that when renters move out of a house, they are committed to leaving it in much worse shape than they found it. If I were smarter, which I’m not, I’d never have to work again. One summer in the mid 1960s a renter moved out and left behind a suitcase full of baseball cards. Hundreds of cards from the 1950s and ’60s. Collector’s items they would be now. I used them in my bicycle spokes to make it sound like a motorcycle. If I had those cards today, I could buy a fleet of motorcycles. Then there was the time I got caught spotlighting rabbits with a 20-gauge shotgun along with my friend, Richard. We were caught near a town called Number Nine. The fine was $25. I had about $20 on me. I got the rest out of Mom’s office. That was about $5 in silver coins. Mom had to put up with me a lot. In my junior year of high school I was suspended three times. Once for 10 days. One day while I was serving a suspension, Mom came home from work to discover a dune buggy in the front yard. I’d found some wrenches and taken the body off of her 1963 Volkswagen. It was four wheels, a frame and an engine. That was it. I learned then it was easier taking the body off than it was putting it back on. It was a dune buggy for only a few days. Mom left town to go to Danville on Christmas Eve one year. Danville was almost 300 miles away. Mom went to check on one of her jewelry stores. She had several stores across the state. When she came back, I was just getting out of jail. In fact, I’d been in two jails in two different states during a 24-hour period. Dad owned a truck/auto stop on I-55. He had gone to Danville with Mom. Two of my best friends, the aforementioned Richard and my other pal, Phil, began coming by about 8 p.m. The earliest I could close was 10 p.m. “Come on, man,” Richard pleaded. “Dad will never know.” Richard loved my father and always called him “Dad.” I refused to close early. About every 30 minutes Richard and Phil would return, again pleading for me to close the place and go with them. I refused. When 10 p.m. rolled around, here came that 1969 Nova of Phil’s whipping into the driveway. I had no excuse, other than refuse because they were obviously both drunk. But 17-year-olds don’t let good judgement get in the way of having fun. I jumped in the back seat. We’d only gone a couple of miles when Richard handed me a beer. I’d just opened the beer when it happened. There were blue lights on our rear bumper. Phil panicked and floored it. Minutes later we were crossing the state line into Missouri. The Missouri law joined in the pursuit. At the town of Steele, Mo. there was a roadblock at an intersection and hundreds of people waiting to see what was going on. Phil stopped and we were promptly thrown in the city jail. Richard, even drunker than Phil, demonstrated his disapproval by urinating in the waste basket in city hall as we were being booked. “That’ll be an extra hundred dollars for you!” one of the arresting officers said to Richard. We were in the Steele jail for about 20 minutes before the Arkansas State Police showed up to escort us to the Mississippi County Jail. I’d had maybe two sips of beer, but was deemed guilty by association. Rightfully so. Richard and Phil were drunk. The law knew it. I was stupid. The law figured that out. That whole thing could have been kept a secret. Richard’s grandmother came and paid my bail before Mom and Dad got home from Danville. But Brother Paul Kirkendall, head of the Mississippi County Mission, came through jail on Christmas morning handing out fruit baskets to the inmates. The local newspaper was there taking pictures. You don’t have to guess who was pictured reaching through the bars for a basket of apples and oranges. It made the front page. Mom, you’ve got me to thank for you being an indestructible “tank.” You’re welcome. Happy Mother’s Day. But I still don’t know what to do for Mother’s Day. You’re hard to shop for and I still think you were just being polite when I bought you that trampoline. (Mark Bivens is the editor of the Malvern Daily Record) |
