Someone Else at the Graduation

This picture is taken at my father's graduation ceremony from Northwestern. The year is 1948 and my mother is 28.

I love the way the two of us, Jimmy and I, huddle around her, like she's the big oak in the forest and we're two timid little squirrels. Of course, my mom always had this appealing maternal quality of being stronger than anyone around her. For this we can thank her upbringing. Both her parents were from the west of Ireland, from remote farm areas which today we might call "backward". Their conception of childhood was, shall we say, abbreviated. As their oldest daughter, my mom was not only expected to do much of the shopping by the time she was seven, but to haggle with the butcher as well. Worse, if the cut of meat she brought home wasn't up to my grandmother's high standards, then back you go, Marie. "I used to be so embarrassed," my mom told me later, "I can still remember how flushed my face would get when I'd walk back in his shop holding this piece of meat which we hadn't re-wrapped properly and now it was dripping on the floor. I could barely get the words out, plus the butcher would always be mean and make me show him what was wrong with the piece. Make me feel like a crook is more like it."

But it didn't seem to faze my grandmother who, once a week or so, would hand my mom a pail and send her down to the local tavern where she was expected to fill the pail to the brim with beer - and not a drop less, Marie. Oh sure, sometimes, if it was dark out, my mom's little sister would be told to go along as well, apparently in the belief that two little girls were less of a temptation in the dark than one.

The most traumatic experience, however, occurred when my mom was in second grade. During her Easter vacation, she and her wild brother, Bill, were squeezed onto a crowded Chicago Avenue streetcar with instructions for the motorman to make sure these quasi-orphans reached County Hospital for a scheduled tonsillectomy. In my grandfather's defense, the motorman, like my grandfather, was from County Kerry, as were most of the motormen then, so it was almost like riding in the family car. Still and all, a thing like tonsillectomy being perpetrated sans parents - and without some 1920s version of Family Services raiding the household later - well, I must say, it's a testament to the wild and woolly proposition that was child-rearing back then.