Jeanne Collette

A few occasional readers (I don’t think I have any faithful readers) urged me to blog more. These readers didn’t take things a step further and tell me what to write about, so I’ve been rolling ideas around my head to see if I could get a tingle on the keyboard. It took a while and I passed up easier targets such as my return to Thailand, Middle East messiness, and the cult-like DNC convention, but I settled on a subject much closer to my heart.

In the seven years I’ve toyed around with this blog, I haven’t devoted a single post to my mom – or my dad, but I’ll fix that slight later. There have been so many posts covering Bill, my grandmother and my family, it is sort of strange my mom has two dozen fewer mentions than Diane Lane. Well, maybe not that strange.

She died on October 12, 1995 and had a hell of a life for 66 years prior to that. If one were to search for a single word to describe her, most would say she was a “character.” Now being a character puts her in the company of a lot of pesky people and there were times her behavior was a trifle maddening, but for most people she met she left a lasting impression with an irreverent remark and, some would say, a teenager’s view of life. Any way you looked at her, you were left with the impression she viewed life as nothing but an opportunity to have fun.

There are so many fond memories of her that it’s impossible to catalog them in any semblance of chronological order. So I’ll just throw them out in a random way.

She was an elementary school teacher and she couldn’t have loved the job more. I used to tell her that her students were her audience and that was the reason she liked teaching. She often bristled at my comment because, while I think I was partially being factual, she really took great pride in getting her kids to learn and be challenged to learn beyond their years. She was, in fact, a great teacher and had something of a Pied Piper appeal to her kids. I remember her first kindergarten class because I was only a few years older than her students. I heard stories about her kids at the dinner table so often I felt like I knew them myself. Over the years, she got dozens of letters from those students, letting her know they had graduated sixth grade, junior high, high school, what colleges they got into and even a letter later in her life that touted her former student’s success, giving her credit for much of it.

I attended a different elementary school than the one she taught in but was in the same school district. I cringed when I thought about the fact that all elementary schools would merge into the same junior high school and I would be outed as my mom’s kid. There were tales of her pulling older kids’ hair, hitting them with hangers, trying to make them cry when they did something wrong, and generally pestering them throughout grade school. When I got to junior high, I was shocked to have so many kids come up to me and tell me what a funny mom I had and how cool she was. They actually liked the idea of getting their hair pulled, mostly because they knew they deserved it.

She had three boys and it showed when she taught. She never took the girl’s side in any playground dispute. Girls would come up to her and cry and tell her sad tales of boys throwing dirt balls or calling them names. She would constantly frustrate them by asking what they had done to deserve it. Of course she realized the boys weren’t angels, but the group-think back in the Sixties was that little girls were pure and fluffy and boys were dirty and rough. She rejected this notion and blindly took the boys’ side.

Protecting boys didn’t stop with her students. Her three boys could do no wrong, either. If I had just shot someone and the body was lying down in front of me and I was holding a still smoldering gun, she would probably just say, “Nice shot!” And if the police were to come and see the same scene, she would tell them I couldn’t possibly be the shooter, they were just seeing things wrong.

My mom had a knack for embarrassing her boys. Truthfully, she had a knack for embarrassing her boys’ friends, too. I remember when we moved to California and I desperately wanted to play football and have an ounce of coolness before heading into the ninth grade. I got on a Pop Warner football team that was all about being rough and tough – not sensitive to the needs of my fellow teammates as was more my approach. A few weeks into the season she was driving me to practice dressed in a housecoat with her hair in curlers. She spotted two of my teammates in their uniforms hitching for a ride. With great glee, she pulled over to pick them up and take them to practice. Mind you, these were the two coolest guys on the team and I think they already didn’t like me much. I was cringing and hoping my mom wouldn’t talk to them and they wouldn’t notice how she was dressed. Not more than 30 seconds into the ride, she asked them, “Do you guys smoke pot?” My ninth grade coolness opportunity ended with that question.

My mom also had difficulty keeping her opinions to herself when it involved one of her sons. In keeping with the football theme, she hated the fact I was a benchwarmer. Naturally, to her thinking, her son should be the star. Since I was about four feet tall and weighed 90 pounds, it was just good coaching to keep me at the end of the bench. The coach of my team played a few downs in the NFL and had any career hope cut short by Chicago Bears linebacker Dick Butkus tackling him so brutally that he tore his knee up. So while I was riding the bench and my team was losing by the typical 30-40 points, my mom wanted me to get some playing time. She would yell, “Put Arno in!” and, when that didn’t work, she’d chant “Butkus, Butkus!” I had very few friends that year.

Now, back to pot smoking; and this has been a touchy subject with a few folks. With the statute of limitations far enough behind her, it can be told she smoked pot. She smoked it to “see what the big deal is.” She didn’t think it was much of a big deal, but then again she did have dinner ready at 3 p.m. on her first trial of my brother’s stash. Several years later she cooked up some pot-filled brownies and served them to her art group, all of whom were her best friends and completely unaware of her social experiment. She didn’t bother to tell anyone and I suppose just wanted to keep the inside joke inside. With Bill nodding in encouragement, I told the pot story at her funeral. With some of those victims in attendance, I heard one of them shout out, “I thought so!!!”

My mom’s desire to be one of her kids (does that make sense?) often caused rough moments, especially when I was a teenager. Whenever I had friends over, she wanted to join in at whatever we were doing. If we were playing a game, she wanted to be dealt in, if we were just chitchatting, she wanted to chitchat, too. And when it came to the love lives of her boys, she wanted to be fully informed, probably as much to make sure the girls we were dating were treating us like kings. I remember when my second girlfriend callously dumped me for not paying attention to her (or something like that, I wasn’t really listening), my mom found me in tears in my room. When I told her what happened, she said, “I never liked her!!” Of course two minutes earlier she would have said she loved her, but she had done her son wrong and that was a capital offense to her (sorry BB).

After my senior year Sladed and the Wop, among others, decided to kidnap me, tie me up, dig a hole at the beach, place me in the hole and let the tide roll in around my head. I’m still unsure why this was necessary. The kidnapping ended up taking place about five feet from my parent’s bedroom window when I was jumped by a ski-mask-wearing Sladed. Lots of grumbling and whimpering occurred and my mom, now fully awake, thought there was something like a human sacrifice taking place. She yelled out if everything was OK and I suspect that ended the balance of my “friend’s” plan. Living at the beach at the time, our driveway became a convenient place to park for friends headed to the ocean. The next day, Sladed parked his car in our driveway and he, the Wop and others knocked on the door to see if I wanted to join them. I told them I would meet them at the beach while my mom scowled at them. Sladed was smart enough not to place his car keys in his usual spot on the windowsill next to the door. I waited for a bit and then went to where Sladed’s towel was stretched out on the beach. Rolled up at the corner were his car keys. I took them and went back to the house. My mom giggled as “our” plot unfolded to plan. I drove Sladed’s car about three miles from our house while my mom drove the getaway car behind me. After parking Sladed’s car, my mom picked me up and we drove back home. I brought the keys and put them back on Sladed’s towel. All that was left at that point was to wait for my kidnapping friends. We kneeled down at my window, occasionally popping our heads up to see if our prey was approaching. When they finally arrived, my mom began laughing as she watched Sladed curse about his missing car. The kidnap plotters walked around in circles trying to figure out the best place to look for the car and that only made my mom laugh harder. Eventually they found their car, but I think my mom enjoyed the act of revenge more than I did.

Both my kids felt a huge loss when she passed when they were 11 and 13. As much as she was a playmate to my friends and me she was the same to her grandchildren. She took them to toy stores, not so much because they needed toys, but because she was greatly entertained watching them carefully pick out their toys. She taught them how to use inappropriate words with her “Fifteen Minutes of Bad Words,” and even encouraged certain poses for photographs that would get most people arrested these days.

The good news is a part of her lives on. I have a lot of her in me (just ask my kids), The Girl was infected with a lot of her personality and playfulness, and it even got passed down to Peter’s granddaughter who, at almost two years old, demonstrates attributes that can only be described as “Jeanne-like.”

As for me, and why she’s never been given a post during the past seven years, I think I have the answer. My mom and I were always very close; a relationship that was more like best friends than a mother and son. When she died ever so young, I mourned her loss, but I felt there was nothing that needed to be settled between us. Everything that needed to be said had already been said, every issue that needed examining was examined and we both knew the last time we saw each other, we parted with friendship, mutual respect and unfaltering love. That was good enough for me and has made it easier to deal with her loss. The only thing that gives me continued pain is how much my family has missed her presence and the stories to come that were bound to make this post twice as long.

If cancer hadn’t gotten the better of her she’d be only 83 today, hardly an outrageously long life. I can imagine what a huge pest she’d be by now and, strangely, it’s that pesky nature I miss the most. I guess I need The Girl to step things up a few notches….