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Growing Up Adapted from Growing Up by New York Times columnist…
Growing Up
Adapted from Growing Up by New York Times columnist Russel Baker.
At the age of eighty my mother had her last bad fall, and after that her mind
wandered free through time. Some days she went to weddings and funerals
that had taken place half a century earlier. On others she presided over family
dinners cooked on Sunday afternoons for children who were now gray with
age. Through all this she lay in bed but moved across time, traveling among
the dead decades with a speed and ease beyond the gift of physical science.
Mother: “Where’s Russell” she asked one day when I came to visit at the
nursing home.
Russel: “I’m Russell,” I said.
She gazed at this improbably overgrown figure out of an inconceivable future
and promptly dismissed it.
Mother: “Russell is only this big,” she said, holding her hand, palm down, two
feet from the floor.
That day she was a young country wife in the backyard with a view of hazy
blue Virginia mountains behind the apple orchard, and I was a stranger old
enough to be her father.
Early one morning she phoned me in New York.
Mother: “Are you coming to my funeral today?” she asked.
It was an awkward question with which to be awakened.
Russel: “What are you talking about, for Gods sake?” This was the best reply
I could manage.
Mother: “I’m being buried today.”
She declared briskly, as though announcing an important social event.
Russel: “I will phone you back.”
I hung up, and when I did phone back she was all right, although she wasn’t
all right, of course, and we all knew she wasn’t.
She had always been a small woman short, light-boned, delicately
structured but now, under the white hospital sheet, she was becoming tiny.
I thought of a doll with huge, fierce eyes. There had always been a fierceness
in her. It showed in that angry challenging thrust of the chin when she issued
an opinion, and a great one she had always been for issuing opinions.
Mother: “I tell people exactly what’s on my mind.” She had been fond of
boasting, “whether they like it or not.”
Russel: “Its not always good policy to tell people exactly what’s on you mind.”
I used to caution her.
Mother: “If they don’t like it, that’s too bad.” That was her customary reply,
“because that’s the way I am.”
And so she was, a formidable woman, determined to speak her mind,
determined to have her way, determined to bend those who opposed her. She
had hurled herself at life with an energy that made her seem always on the
run.
She ran after chickens, an axe in her hand, determined on a beheading that
would put dinner in the pot. She ran when she made the beds, ran when she
set the table. One Thanksgiving she burned herself badly when, running up
from the cellar even with the ceremonial turkey, she tripped on the stairs and
tumbled down, ending at the bottom in the debris of giblets, hot gravy, and
battered turkey. Life was combat, and victory was not to the lazy, the timid,
the drugstore cowboy, the mush-mouth afraid to tell people exactly what was
on his mind. She ran.
Where did Baker’s mother think she was living?
How did the last fall affect the lady?
What did she imagine?
In describing the incident in which his mother said, “I’m being buried today,” Baker uses the term “all right.” What does he actually mean?
How does the lady’s’ situation impact Baker?
