But it’s not easy to fool a mother’s nature

Lying has always been hard for me. And, as hard as it is to admit from the vantage point of 74, I was a bit of a mother’s boy. So, lying to my mother came at the cost of round-the-clock guilt. But, hey, I was building a self.

Grass

How do I start my story with “I remembered the sharp scent of freshly cut grass as I waited at the dining room window for Sharon” when the only photo of my childhood home is this one I took five years after my mother died and 58 years after the events I will describe?

You’ll have to imagine a lawn full of grass. It’s almost impossible, I know, given this replacement monstrosity. My story is about the sin of lying. What do you call this trespass?

I wanted you to see the first-floor dining room window on the right, my second-floor bedroom window on the left, the outdoor steps, and the brick street. And smell the grass I had just mowed before Sharon showed up.

I was the oldest of three sons, so mowing the front lawn was my first outdoor chore. At 13, my dad taught me an up-and-down system using a long cloth rope tied around the mower handle as a pulley. The first time I tried it alone, while Dad was at work, the rope slipped under the mower and was shredded. So, I put my Pony League baseball cleats on and pushed the green Lawn-Boy across the lawn without the machine and me rolling into the street.

My first teenage triumph. The second would come three years later.

Sharon

It was an early spring day, and, as you know, the smell of grass was in the air. I was 16, and Sharon and I had just started dating.

I opened the first-floor dining room window on the right to smell my accomplishment, listened for the soft rumble of Sharon’s pale aqua-blue car on the brick, and turned toward my mother.

My brother Peter and I shared a bedroom behind the second-floor dormer window on the left. When I was younger, my dad was often away on business trips. I had the bed closest to the window. On warm nights, I would open it to hear the sound of his car on the brick street turn into the driveway. Then, I would fall asleep knowing my dad was safely home and my mom would be at peace until his next trip.

“You can’t get serious about her, you know,” my mother says from the kitchen across the Sunday pot roast dining room table after I told her I was waiting for Sharon.

Sharon was Jewish and the daughter of my Baskin Robbin’s boss, Wendell. We were Catholic. By we, I mean everyone but my dad, who was raised protestant. My mom would have said the same thing if Sharon had been Lutheran.

I knew this story. Before they married in 1948, Mom talked my dad into going through the Rite of Christian Initiation for adults to prepare for conversion to Catholicism. Dad gave it a try but was treated so poorly by the priest that he eventually said, “No more, not ever again.” Even at 16, I knew the religious difference was a source of tension between them. When Mom said, “You can’t get serious,” I knew she was serious.

Lying

Hearing the honk and saying nothing, I leave my mother and walk out the front door and down the steps.

Sharon and I would date for two years. That was the last time she picked me up in front of my house. And the last time I told my parents what I was up to. A few months later, we started Saturday night drive-in dates. Fortunately, by the mid-1960s, my family had two cars: a mid-size sedan and a small Fiat. The Fiat had bucket seats, so I needed the Pontiac.

I’m picking up Jerry, Ed, Pat, and Mike, and we’re hanging out.

Riding in that same car to Sunday mass burdened me with guilt and fear about whether there was any evidence of my deception.

It was all so easy.

Too easy, as it turns out.

It was early evening at Duck Creek Park’s Little League Diamond #1. My little brother Pat is playing, and my parents are sitting in the bleacher section behind home plate. My dad, in his Fiat, met us at the game. I needed the sedan for a date. I’m sitting next to my mom.

“Can I have the car?”

“Where are you going?”

“Over to Jerry Spaeth’s.”

She turned her head, looked directly at me, and said quietly,

“Paul, I know exactly what you’re doing. Don’t think I don’t.”

Mothers and sons

Dody Gardner died in 2017 at 96. At the lunch after her funeral, I met one of her long-time friends. I knew John Bishop from the bridge parties my parents hosted. John, a physician, and life-long bridge player, told me my mom was the finest player he knew.

During lunch, I asked a few of Mom’s younger friends, all bridge players, about this, and they nodded. “No one was better,” Peg said.

Even as Mom was sinking into dementia, when playing solitaire, she continued snapping down cards in triumph or disgust.

Good bridge players think strategically. Mom knew my personality, that I could not rebel directly. I needed to lie to grow up. To separate myself from her and my dad. She was confident I would discard the disreputable means when I no longer needed them.

That’s precisely what happened.

The skillful bridge player had won the trick.