Pets by Gillian

My mother was a great one for pets. She had pet peeves, pet grievances, pet projects, pet phrases, and, being a school teacher, even teacher's pets! She herself used these expressions.

"Oh, you know that's one of my pet peeves," she'd say as a hand projected from a passing car to deposit unsightly fish-and-chip wrapping in the flowering hedgerow. Split infinitives was another. Star Trek was after her time, but I cannot hear that phrase, to boldly go, without imagining how she would have given a sharp intake of breath, shaken her head sadly, and told the TV, admonishingly, "It's either boldly to go, or to go boldly, NOT to boldly go!"  Split infinitives, she always stated, set her teeth on edge. Fortunately for her, being a teacher, fingernails on the blackboard did not!

I, also, have pet peeves; people who, chatting on their cellphones, crash their grocery carts into my ankles. Or almost crash their car into my car. Or shout into their cellphones at the table next to mine in a restaurant, or in line at the supermarket. Or those who, speaking of the supermarket line, react in astonishment when the clerk implies that they need actually to pay (see, no split infinitive!) for their groceries, and begin an endless hunt, in a bottomless purse, for their checkbook.

Mom's pet grievances, and they were many, were all sub-titles. They related, mostly directly, occasionally indirectly, to the the Grand Category of Grievances: my father. What he had ever done to deserve this, I never could ascertain; but I have written about this before so will not repeat myself. Suffice it to say that I loved my dad, and never truly understood Mom's animosity.

When I say I loved him, I don't mean that he was my dad so of course I loved him in spite of all his faults and wrong-doings. I mean that I loved him because of who he was, not despite it.

I have my own grievances, but most of mine, or so I like to think, are general rather than personal.  "A feeling of resentment over something believed to be wrong or unfair," says the online dictionary.  Given that definition, yes, I grieve every war and every youth sacrificed to it. I grieve every starving person with no food to eat, and every thirsty person with no water to drink. I grieve man's inhumanity to man, but then you've heard all that before, too. In the last couple of years or so I find myself forced to grieve for young black people killed, no, let's use the right word here, murdered, for no reason other than the color of their skin, by angry bigoted white men.

My mother's pet projects, in the sense of those which go on, year after year, were writing, both poetry and prose, and pressing flowers. I do my best with writing, and truly love doing it, but the pressed flowers somehow passed me by. I do love to photograph them, though, so perhaps that's some kind of higher-tech equivalent. My latest pet project is organizing my photos into a series of theme books.

And so to pet phrases!

Do as you would be done by. If the whole world lives by those few words, what a wonderful world it would be!

If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. We, as a society, definitely have abandoned that one!

Oh dear! What will people think? Mom, a product of an age when appearances greatly mattered, said that quite frequently to both me and my dad, neither of us great respecters of neighbors' judgments.  

This one was somewhat at odds with another pet phrase of Mom's.

"Just be comfortable," she'd respond, in any discussion of what to wear, but then proceed to "what will people think?" when I arrived in slacks or my dad without a tie. Mom was not without her inconsistencies, but we learned easily enough how to deal with them and my mother was, on the whole, considerate, sweet, and kind. As with my dad, I loved her very much, simply for who she was.

My mother had, quite literally, generations of teacher's pets. She began teaching in the local two-room school in 1928 and retired in the early 1970's, so, except for few years out in the 40's, she taught in the same room for about forty years. At the end she was teaching some whose grandparents she had taught.  

"Oh that little Johnny Batchett!" she'd exclaim. She never denied having favorites but she would never have treated them as the classic teachers’ pets. She would have taken great care never to show any hint of favoritism.

"He's got that same little cheeky smile as his granddad! He's got his mother's dimples though. The girls are going to be round him like bees around the honey! Of course, his dad was just the same. All 'love them and leave them' young Tom was, till those dimples hooked him fair and square ..... " and off she'd go.

" ...... but that Yvonne Atkins! What a little madam! Still, what can you expect? Her mum and dad, both such discipline problems at that age. I'll never forget the time ......."  My dad would give me his covert wink, and we'd settle down to listen, or at least pretend we were.

Recalling Mom's pet thises and thats reminds me, once again, how the world has changed over the course of my life. Not too many people these days are taught by the same person who taught their grandparents, or even their parents. Or even, come to that, an older sibling.

Most of us care little what anyone thinks of the way we look, or often even the way we act.  Those old admonitions such as the Golden Rule, once painstakingly embroidered and hung on the wall, have more or less disappeared; I'm quite sure they aren't about to go viral any time soon. I'm not suggesting we abided by such things in our day, but at least we were aware of the concept; perhaps we tried.

Yes, I am being an old curmudgeon. My own pet peeves and grievances grow apace.  Well why not? There is much of this Brave New World I do not like.  But there would, I suspect, be more to dislike, knowing what I now know, if I returned to that rose-colored past, than there is in the reality of the present. Why would I want to return to a world where homosexuality was illegal? A woman having a baby was forced to quit her job, and for this reason could not get a loan to buy a house or car in her own name, no matter how well paid she was. And even after the birth control pill gave women much better control over their own reproductive rights, it was illegal to provide [or] prescribe them for an unmarried woman.  No. I really want np part of it.

As for the future, who knows?

As Jay Asher says, in his novel Thirteen Reasons Why -

"You can't stop the future

You can't rewind the past

The only way to learn the secret

... is to press play."

So as I'm not yet quite ready to press the stop button, and certainly not the eject, I guess I'd better do just that!

© 18 August 2014 

About the Author 

 I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.