The Long Arm of the Law

What do Matt Dillon, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp and my mother have in common? Each could put the fear of God into any gunslinger, or in the case of my mother, into her runny-nosed, mercurochromed, wisenheimer kids every time one of them lipped off at another. None of us would have dared lip off at Mom. 

You could be in any room in our house and my mother could rap you in the back of your head from any other room in the house, and not take so much as one step in your direction.

You'd be standing in the middle of the living room basking in the glow of having just called your brother a sticky stalactite booger, Mom would be in the kitchen and WHAP.

She could bounce braids with one of those four-fingered love taps, love taps that seemed devoid of any love short of the kind in Scared Straight. These raps in the head never hurt, but they got our attention. And in truth we knew she loved us with everything she had.

Eventually my brothers and I resorted to experimental methods of insulting each other hoping to fly under our mother's radar.

We tried whispering our insults upstairs when Mom was sweeping the sidewalk . . . and WHAP.

We passed notes to each other in the basement while Mom was in the bathtub and . . . WHAP.

We coded messages to each other using secret decoder rings while Mom was next door having coffee and . . . WHAP. 


I wish I could describe to you what these encounters with our mother looked like, but it's a little like that problem people have after near death experiences when they find human speech wobbly, puny and inadequate to the task of describing something so astonishing.


One day, years after we'd grown up, my brother was driving somewhere with his kids, my mother, and me. My little nephew was on the driver's side in the back seat and my mother was on the passenger side up front. Then my nephew said something of which my mother disapproved and  . . . WHAP. My nephew never saw it coming.

"Whoa! What was that?" he yelped, not hurt, but surprised.

"That son," said his father, "was the long arm of the law."

Sweet Nothings

Sometimes in marriage it’s all about timing. Take for instance, Melrose and Ed. 

This was the early sixties and Ed worked for one of Southern Michigan’s General Motors assembly plants. He was that era's quintessential “regular Joe." He went to work in clean but faded coveralls and carried a big, black, barn-shaped lunchbox. 

And like a lot of men back then, Ed just might have been a wee bit chauvinistic.

But whatever Ed’s attitudes towards women, they did not include the conviction that after work his place was with his wife. His place, Ed felt, was with his fellow assembly workers at a neighborhood drinking establishment; the cinder-block construction, neon light illumination kind of drinking establishment.

Meanwhile, Ed’s wife, Melrose was the regular wife of the regular Joe. She stayed at home even though the kids were well out of the nest, claiming she was focused on homemaking. And she maybe wasn’t quite as on top of her appearance as when she and Ed first met. 

Melrose might also have had a tendency to meet her husband at the door (on the rare occasions he came straight home) in curlers and a house dress, the bunions on her feet peeking at Ed through threadbare slippers.

So there's a chance that each of them had reason to feel a bit resentful of the other.

One night, Ed was out at the bar knocking back a few while Melrose lay in bed dreaming of Ed’s early demise, so bitter was she over his nocturnal fellowship habits. When Ed came stumbling through the back door, Melrose didn’t hear him. 

This, of course, was before the days of cell phones when a third party could pick up the phone and either join the other two parties or just listen in, provided said person's phone was in the same residence as at least one of the others. 

When the phone rang, it startled them both, Ed in the kitchen and Melrose in the bedroom. They picked up within milliseconds of one another, Melrose assuming it was Ed and Ed with no clue who it was.

They said hello in unison before Melrose yelled: “Where the hell have you been? Do you know what time it is?”

“Hell, yes, I know what time it is!” Ed yelled back. He consulted his watch but it kept swimming around in front of his face. “By the way, what time is it?”

“It’s time your drunken carcass was here where it belongs! Why the hell aren’t you home?”

“What the hell do you mean, why the hell aren’t I home? I am home and damned if it isn’t hell!”

“Well, if you’re home, get your ass in bed!”

“My ass is in bed! It’s name is Melrose!”

“Aw, go to hell!”

“No! You go to hell!”

Ed and Melrose slammed down their receivers.

A few seconds later, Ed’s boss hung up, too.