Hey Ma! and the story of Squish

You will go to bed.


Desptie my shyt day yesterday, I thought I'd take time out to speak about my Mamma (while I'm considering what to get her for Mother's Day). Ma, as I call her. It does trip me out to think about how people address their mother. I was never the "mommy" type and while I don't think of myself as an "Alpha" male, I do find Ma to be a masculine way to address one's mother. My mother is easily 99% of my source of intelligence, humor and geekiness. I'll say it this way I was in the theater for all the Star Wars movies. The first came out in '77 so I didn't get to see it, but I was present. Because of my mother I have seen hundreds of black and white sci-fi and horror movies. My mother is the reason I started playing Atari and Intellivision and now own a PS2 and an XBox. I started playing as a challenge trying to beat her high scores and kept on till this day. I will say she reverted to Tetris and Bejeweled after a while but recently she picked up one of those plug and play joints so she can rock some Duck Hunt. Like my mother I have a sick sense of humor. One of her favorite things to do was to tickle me (horribly ticklish in my youth). It got so bad that if she just walked into the room I would bust out laughing - my body expecting to be tickled anyway. The most hilarious and long lasting thing she ever did to me was a white lie she told. When we (my cousins and I) were about 6 we had squash for dinner one evening and none of us liked it. In order to get us to eat she told us it wasn't squash, it was his little brother squish. We proceeded to dig in as if the taste had suddenly changed. Anyway, 15 years later and on a vegetarian diet me and my room-mate are in the market getting things to stir-fry and I'm trying to think of vegetables I don't eat much. As we go through the fresh vegetables I suddenly ask " Yo son, where do they keep the squish." He looks at me real funny and I suddenly realize - there is no vegetable called squish. It was all a y'all-gonna-eat-this-damn-food lie. I felt so stupid being that I had never had or heard of squish outside of my house. This is only one of the things my mother has done that has produced a laugh from me and my family or at our expense. When my cousin was graduating from Headstart her class had to recite this poem called black is beautiful. She spent many days trying to memorize it. The last line goes..."in my heart and in my mind black is the color that I find". Well my mother helped my cousin memorize it but she made a slight change to the words. My cousin then took it upon herself to teach her whole class this "edited" version. Suffice it to say none of the parents were too thrilled when the entire Headstart class ended the poem with "In my heart and in my mind, black is the color of my behind." I was quite tickled. Another of my mother's favorite things to do (mine now as well) is to teach children who can't really speak yet how to say: no, don't and stop. There are few things funnier than the frustration from a parent who's child can only say these three words. My mother...the lover of Godzilla movies, Westerns, Star Trek and Star Wars. The source of the geek within me. My mother knew about DVD's when VHS was cool. Her computer would blow away most peoples and if it's tech she knows the deal. The best thing about my mother is how she speaks to children...she always told me that since they are learning you should speak to children the way you want them to speak. Basically if you speak that baby talk that's what children learn. Because of this we've been having an adult conversation since I was 5. The only difference is I'm getting more interesting in the last decade. To my mother who was born the same year as one of her favorite movies came out (War of the Worlds). I tell her an alien invasion could account for some things about her but anyway she's pretty damn cool and I love her. Now if I could just find a gift before sunday...BTW I hope they cook something that day, a brothers doing bad on the food tip this week.