(HOST With Mother’s Day coming up, commentator Philip Baruth can’t help but remember a day in 1974, when reports of Philip’s own death were greatly exaggerated.
(BARUTH) In 1974, my mother was running her own very small business, a dog-grooming operation called the Pampered Pet, located in our basement. Most folks dropped their dogs off early, and picked them up late, and it’s fair to say that the dogs were none too happy with these arrangements. So the animals tended to bark and cry incessantly.
Which occasionally made it tough to hear in our house, growing up.
One summer day, I went down to the cellar to tell my mother my friend Beth and I were going swimming at a local farmer’s pond. It was no big deal: I shouted to my mother, and because she couldn’t hear a word over the barking, my mother nodded absently and went back to her Yorkshire Terrier.
Beth and I got on our bikes and headed out. Only later would I learn the sequence of events at home:
Once she’d finished the terrier’s ears, my mother came upstairs to ask me if I wanted some lunch. I wasn’t in my room. She yelled for me and got no reply.
You have to understand that my mom was the nervous, chain-smoking sort in those days. So just about then, she began to get a vague premonition that something was really wrong. And for some reason the phrase “Parson’s Pond” floated up in her mind as well.
So my mother called the Parson’s farm. Now, in 1974, all television was horrible, but one of the very worst shows was Emergency!, which featured the exploits of two LA County firemen. And the half-hour opened with a really loud siren.
Long story short: my mother dials the phone, hears the opening of Emergency! playing on the Parson’s TV, and faints dead away on the kitchen floor. Because she is convinced – rationally enough – that the sound can mean only one thing: her baby boy has drowned in Parson’s Pond.
Just then my sister walks in the door and sees my mother out cold. My mother comes to and blurts out the awful truth: “Philip drowned in Parson’s Pond!”
My sister bursts into tears. And because my father had the car that day, both my mother and my sister go running up the road, sobbing uncontrollably. Our neighbor, Mr. Taplan, sees them and bolts out of his house. “What is it?” he yells.
“Philip’s drowned in Parson’s Pond!” my mother and my sister scream.
And so Mr. Taplan piles them into his Chevy Nova, and they go screaming down the road.
Meanwhile, Beth and I are splitting a pack of Ho-Ho’s, when we hear what sounds like a car fishtailing in the parking lot above the pond. By the time we reach the top of the hill, there are my mother and my sister, on their knees in the dirt, praying and sobbing. They couldn’t make it any farther.
I’ll never forget: I walked up and tapped my mother on the shoulder, and she looked up at me, eyes swimming with tears, and she threw her arms around my neck and started screaming, “My boy! My boy!”
It was all a crazy mistake, but I saw something I’d never seen before, that parents, maybe mothers especially, have in them something unbelievably powerful, strong enough to lift a Buick – but only if the Buick is blocking the way to their injured child.
So I thought, with Mother’s Day coming up and everything, I’d just take a second here at the end to say: I’m fine, Mom. Not to worry. And I love you too.
Philip Baruth is a novelist living in Burlington. He teaches at the University of Vermont.