Uninhibited Mentors

June Shaw

Mom couldn’t see or hear well, but at her great-niece’s reception heard someone announce that all unmarried women should go up for the bride to toss her bouquet.

“Get me up there,” Mom told me.

I guided her to a spot behind all of the giggly bridesmaids and other friends of the newlyweds. The bride tossed – and the tall young woman in front of Mom caught it – and my ninety-year-old mother reached up and yanked the flowers out of that girl’s hands. The young women all disappeared, and the bride turned.

“Oh, Aunt Nora,” she said. “You caught my bouquet!”

A photographer appeared and snapped pictures for the wedding album of the bride and the woman who “caught” her bouquet, my mom.

Once the photos were done, Mom told me, “Let’s go find out who caught these. I should give them back.”

Oh, really? So why wait until now? I didn’t voice my thoughts, but we found the girl who’d actually caught the flowers and tried to return them.

Her boyfriend told Mom, “Oh no, we don’t want them. You keep them.”

I was relieved. And enchanted. Characters really do unusual actions. Terrific!

Relative Danger, my first in a series of humorous mysteries, was recently published.

“The main character is so much fun. She’s you!” many readers have told me.

Nope. She’s who I want to be – one woman with traits gleaned from some of my uninhibited mentors. My squeeze Bob is another one. He gets everybody in elevators and waiting rooms talking.

Once he came out of his urologist’s examining room and walked through his crowded waiting room and loudly said, “Ooh, he hurt me. He pulled the wrong tooth.”

Later he needed a procedure done at our hospital. His doctor wanted to pull a prank on some nurses there, so he asked Bob if he’d wear a furry pig costume to the hospital and all the way to the operating room. Bob said the nurses all went hog wild over him.

And then there’s my sister-in-law Lois who will say almost anything. Lois will not hold her tongue if she thinks someone has done something wrong that needs correcting. She seldom uses a quiet tone. If she’s in a room, people know it. And there are a few other uninhibited friends I am blessed to have. With all of my terrific mentors, why should I be the uninhibited one? I’m excited enough with being around them and experiencing their antics. And being inspired by each one of them.

You can see more of June and some of her uninhibited mentors at www.juneshaw.com.

“Why Did I Come in Here Again?” and Other Lost Thoughts

JULIA BUCKLEY
I have memories of my mother, fortyish, wandering into a room where we children lolled about watching television, and hesitating on the threshold, saying, “Now—why did I come in here?”

We’d laugh at her, we heartless children, because we thought it was sweetly eccentric that our mother would often forget the task that had caused her to stride purposefully into a room, sometimes even to open a cabinet and gaze inside, as if hoping the answer lay in there.

But of course her behavior wasn’t eccentric at all. Now that I’m a writer, I realize there are a finite number of thoughts I can fit into my head, and sometimes a few really important ones can get squeezed out. Like—oh! I was supposed to make dinner. Or fill out that endless paperwork that comes home from a grade school—field trip forms, tuition invoices, raffle tickets, notes to teachers, et educational cetera. Or the even more relentless paperwork that goes with my job—the teaching of English to teenaged girls.

And then, beyond all that, there is the Work in Progress. It has to find its way through all of the other thoughts, like water in a jar full of rocks. It has to squeeze through the gaps and bring me the occasional inspiration, even while I’m toiling away with my less inspired but still important mental chores: feed the dog, the cat, the fish. Write those thank you notes, wrap that present, iron his shirt, sew his button.

My mother, though she’s the most mature woman I’ve ever known, must take the occasional secret pleasure in watching me fall into all of the traps I was sure, as a bold and sarcastic youth, that I would avoid. In her day, she had to maintain her mental equilibrium while caring for FIVE children, a husband, a cat and a dog. I only have two children, and yet I understand, now, how really extraordinary my mother was. She got a college degree later than most, at age fifty, and she wrote for pleasure, for sheer pleasure, which was the same reason that she would read.

My mom is the one who got me hooked on mysteries. She’s still an addict herself. Back when we were kids, she would reward herself for daily chores with quick little doses of whatever book she had at the time: Georgette Heyer, Phyllis Whitney, Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt. She’d read a chapter or two, then jump up and say, “Now, why did I get up?”

So today I found myself wandering into a room, initially with a firm purpose. I still felt the urgency by the time I reached my destination, but I had forgotton the task. “Why did I come in here?” I asked my sons, who, as tradition would have it, were watching tv.

“We don’t KNOW, Mom,” my eldest said dryly.

Ah, just you wait.


(image: www.pevexenterprises.co.uk)