Moms

Moms

When Tom was about 12 years old, his mom went to the rectory to help prepare a special Lenten dinner. It was to be enjoyed by the Bishop and some visiting priests and clergy dignitaries from the diocese. Since the dinner was being prepared on a Friday night during Lent, she was surprised to see roast beef and ham on the menu. She had always been brought up to believe that a good Catholic did not eat meat on Friday, much less a Friday in Lent. She watched carefully as the Bishop spread his hands in the air over the meal and announced a special dispensation allowing the eating of meat on this occasion. So when her husband and her children got home for dinner that night, they were more than a little surprised to find a pot roast on the table. She passed her hands over the pot roast a couple of times, and announced a special dispensation. From then on they ate meat whenever they pleased.

I was eight years old before I realized what the roadside market was. On frequent occasions we would have some fresh corn on the cob or some succulent squash and when my father would comment on how good it was, my mom would respond by saying, “It’s just something I picked up at the roadside market”. I finally came to realize that in our agricultural community lots of fresh vegetables fell off the trucks that were transporting them from the field to the market. These serendipitous culinary discoveries were referred to by my mother as “shopping at the roadside market”. One Saturday afternoon as we drove along the freeway returning from an orthodontist appointment, Mom pulled the car over onto the shoulder of the road. She woke my sister and me, asleep in the back seat. Pointing toward the railroad tracks she said, “Go pick up that box”. We roused ourselves from our slumber and scurried across the empty desert space to a forlorn looking cardboard box near the railroad track. One corner of the box was bent where it looked like it might have hit the ground when it fell off a railway car. Imagine our delight when we got home and discovered inside the box was a television set. The hard plastic exterior of the set was broken a little bit on one corner where the box had apparently hit the ground. But it worked beautifully and it doubled the number of TVs in our house from one to two. We never made fun of Mom’s roadside market again.