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."
