My mom's two cents worth
A "COIN-cidence" that made me smile.
WATERLOO — My mom was known to be a bit of a cut-up.
You never knew when she’d come up with a prank, a snarky one liner, or a little surprise.
Like the time she set off a Black Kat firecracker behind the living room couch when we were all watching TV.
She’d squirreled away a couple of them from one of my big brothers who had secured the then-illegal contraband by means unknown to this little tyke.
It was a repeat performance. Years earlier, she set one off in a coffee can under my dad’s chair at the breakfast table.
We’d be playing a game of “Horse” at the driveway basketball hoop over the garage.
You had to be careful if you shot one by the back steps. You might be hit by a splash of water. Mom would toss a glassful of water through the back screen door while doing dishes.
Or I’d be just shooting baskets by myself, and the former hot-shooting forward for the Garrison High School Rockets Class of 1940 would steal the ball from behind me for an easy layup.
In the mid-1960s Mom worked at the Maywood Lunch in downtown Waterloo, a half block from KWWL-TV, which had a live in-studio pro (i.e. fake) wrestling show on Saturday afternoons.
”How many bottles of ketchup did ya have to use TONIGHT?” Mom asked the station manager when he came in after the show. Not sure if she got a tip, but it sounded pretty funny.
I guess she was a bit of a live wire in her single days. The Brown Derby was a popular nightclub downtown in the ‘40s and a favorite hangout of Mom and my Aunt Edith. It was revealed, during one Thanksgiving gathering with extended family not that many years ago, and after some gentle prodding by my cousins, that my dear mother had once sowed the seeds of martial discord with the proprietor of that establishment.
Mom told us she was dancing to “Turkey in the Straw” with the owner and his jealous wife pulled the plug on the jukebox.
She was pretty good at “pulling off a good one” on me even in her advanced years.
In mid-March 2019, about nine months before Mom passed away, I was bringing her home after taking her to Saturday night Mass. I dutifully went around and got her walker out of the trunk set it up and helped her in the door.
Little did I know she’d been up to something while I was fetching her walker.
I came back out to the car after saying my good byes, and sitting there on my coffee mug was a shamrock cut out of green paper that said, “HAPPY ST. PAT’S DAY PADDY!”
Awwwww….
Then there was The Mystery of the Two Cents. That one came back to haunt me recently, and in a good way.
Back in the ‘60s, after she worked at the Maywood and before attending cosmetology school, Mom worked in the lunch room at Sacred Heart School, which my two younger siblings and I attended. It was in the church basement, across the playground from the school. Yes, Mom was a “lunch lady.”
One day I was getting up after eating lunch, and I found I’d been sitting on two pennies. I didn’t think much of it and picked them up. Got up from my seat the next day. Two pennies. And the next day. Two pennies.
This went on for days. Maybe weeks. Seemed weird, but I didn’t think about it much.
Finally one of Mom’s co-workers came over and said “How come you always have two pennies on your chair?”
And I thought, “How did SHE know?”
I never put two and two together. Hey, I was just a dumb kid.
But I’m sure YOU know by now who was responsible.
So all of that came to mind the Monday morning after Mothers Day when something just a little quirky happened. Adopting some of Mom’s habits, I do my grocery run in the early morning hours before going to work.
I hustled through a light drizzle into the store, grabbed my groceries like a good hunter-gatherer, rang them up at the self check and hustled out to the car.
As I rounded the front of the car, there on the ground in front of me, glistening on this dreary, drizzly morning, were two bright shiny pennies.
I did not see them there when I went in the store. I picked them up, and thought of Mom.
How’d they get there? Why didn’t I notice them before?
You can think what you want to think.
I know what I want to think.
We report. You decide.
I’ve decided. And it makes me smile.
Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state who previously and currently work with a host of Iowa newspapers, news organizations and other publications. Click on their links below to sample their work.
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Great story! Great life, too, your mom and you both!
I love your story, Pat. Your mom sounds like she was a hoot and a half!! Thank you for telling us about her.