In 1975 I flew from Shreveport, Louisiana to Cleveland, Ohio to make a sales call on Sherwin Williams. My travel plans called for additional flight legs to New York, City, Charlotte and Atlanta before finally returning home. Mother’s Day was fast approaching, and it would become the first of many Mother’s Days I would miss the blessing of celebrating with my mother and wife due to business travel conflicts.
I rented a car from Hertz after touching down at Cleveland’s Hopkins International Airport, grabbed a Hertz map of the Cleveland area, and off I went to my hotel, a Holiday Inn not far from Sherwin Williams aerosol packaging plant.
“A map?” You might ask if you were born before 1996. Yes, a map, there was no Internet, no GPS, no cell phones and no Waze or Google Maps in 1975.
Horror of horrors, right? Not really, we were much more independent and capable back then — wired for the low-tech world of the 70’s. Road maps were hi-tech for our generation. If I couldn’t afford one, I would simply pull into a service station and ask for directions. This was pre-kids, so no one to tag along with me and complain about how lame and embarrassing it was to ask total strangers for directions.
My worst-case scenario always boiled down to using my woodsman skills and finding my true north by reading moss growing on a tree. Of course you have to have trees in sight. That system pretty much failed me once on a dark desert highway outside Winslow, Arizona, cool wind in my hair, warm smell of colitas rising up through the air . . . ah but I digress — lost in the lyrics from an 8-track.
Traveling by myself never presented fears, stress, worries or obstacles. Heck, at the age of 22 this Louisiana farm boy rented a car at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, and was supposed to travel to Somerville, New Jersey to visit one of my employer’s plants. Realizing I had arrived early and had a lot of time to kill, I grabbed a rental car map and drove straight to Times Square, making my way around the Big Apple like a big shot, checking off “been there – done that check boxes” of places I had read or heard about while growing up in tiny Anacoco, Louisiana. I saw Park Avenue, 5th Avenue, Madison Avenue, Central Park, the Plaza Hotel, Wall Street and didn’t depart the city until I had consumed a great Italian pizza at a sidewalk café in in Greenwich Village.
When people ask me how I had the guts at such a young age to take such a joy ride, particularly a guy who came from a small town with so little experience in the world outside Louisiana, I always answer with the following example — which demonstrates a few of the greatest values that come from growing up poor.
I tell them that when I was 14 years old and in the ninth grade, I once came home from school to find my mother with her head up the ass end of our large Frigidaire washing machine. The washing machine was lying flat on its side and Mom was chest deep into the bowels of this white monster, clanging away with a wrench. I squatted down to get low enough to see what was going on and asked, “Mom, what are you doing?” “What does it look like I’m doing? “The drive belt broke on the washing machine and I’m putting on a new one because apparently your father is too busy to do it himself in this century.” “Have you ever done this before,” I asked. “Nope,” she responded. “Have you ever watched Daddy or Papa do this before?” I asked. “Nope,” she said. “Did you read a Frigidaire manual,” I asked. “No Craig, I didn’t read a damn manual.” She grunted as she strained to get the belt slipped over and into a pulley. It was tight, but she managed. She crawled out from the washing machine, and said, “Now make yourself useful and help your mother get this washing machine back upright and into it’s space.”
Once the washer was upright and plugged back into the electrical outlet she said, “Craig, if you go through life questioning yourself about every little thing you will never get ahead. I didn’t call a serviceman or a company to fix the washer because we don’t have the money. I didn’t call your father because he is too busy making money to put clothes on your back. I didn’t question whether I could fix the washer, I just rolled it over on its side, saw it had a broken belt and said, “I need to replace this. The rest of what I did was God-given intuition. We are Whitley’s. We never say no, we never say I give up, we never say quit and we never say, I can’t do it. We say, give me the chance, let me do it. And we don’t pay the other man for something we can get off our lazy butt and do ourselves. Remember those things and you’ll go far in life.”
My Dad was the same way and led by example. I was taught to never show weakness and never question my abilities. Living on a farm was like living in a learning laboratory. Every day presented new challenges and more chores that had to be performed by the people who lived on the farm, not by outsiders. My sister and I are the same in that manner, we left that farm ready to tackle the world, always testing ourselves, anxious to see how much we could achieve on our own and never doubting our ability to accomplish anything we set our minds to. Looking back, it’s amazing how many powerful takeaways and lessons came out of watching a simple-minded mother change the drive belt on a washing machine, something she had never done before in her life.
Ultimately, that afternoon with Mom and the washing machine became a life-defining moment for me. I knew who I was meant to be, whom I was being groomed to be, what my family stood for, what I would stand for, the reputation I wanted to build for myself and the lessons I would teach my own children. All four will tell you, “Whitley’s never quit, come hell or high water we will get the job done.”
My mother was a real hoot. If she were alive today, she would probably be very disappointed to learn that I no longer mow my own lawn. I haven’t for many years. Although if Trump keeps deporting landscapers, I may have to buy a riding lawn mower, a 5-gallon gas can and a durag.
Now, back to Cleveland and Sherwin Williams. Yeah, you thought I had gone down so many winding paths that I had forgotten about Cleveland, didn’t you.
After a good night’s sleep at the Holiday Inn I got dressed, had a quick breakfast at a local diner and began the drive to my appointment with the Head of Purchasing for Sherwin Williams. On my way I began turning my radio dial until I found a local radio talk show. They were talking about Mother’s Day being just around the corner. I had turned on my radio just a few seconds too late and had missed most of the host’s opening comments, but she was talking about a story about mother’s that had touched her heart and then proceeded to read it to her radio audience. As she read the lines of this beautiful piece the words started tugging at my heartstrings, taking me back to childhood memories of my own mother. Tears began to well up in the corners of my eyes as the guilt and sadness of not being able to spend Mother’s Day 1975 with my mother started to gnaw at me.
At the end of her reading the radio host mentioned that the author of this beautiful tribute to mothers was unknown — anonymous. I thought to myself at the time, “How can I ever find a copy of this, this, this . . . I didn’t even know what to call it. It wasn’t a story, it wasn’t a poem, and it wasn’t a vignette.
Some people refer to it as a short story. Later in life I learned that English Literature professors would probably classify it as a “prose poem,” a piece of writing that is not quite a poem but shares more poetic qualities than a story, maintaining the structure of prose (sentences and paragraphs) while incorporating poetic elements like imagery, rhythm, and evocative language.
Several weeks later I would find myself thinking of this prose poem often. Eventually, I did the only type of detective work we had at our disposal in 1975. I went to my local library in Shreveport, looked up the names and addresses of all the FM stations in Cleveland, Ohio (I could not recall the station I was listening to in Cleveland), and I mailed every one of the stations a letter, asking if they would kindly mail me a copy of the prose poem, including a self-stamped and address envelope. After many weeks it finally came in the mail. I was ecstatic when it arrived. I read it a couple of times, made a Xerox copy and mailed it to my mother, apologizing once again for not being able to be with her on Mother’s Day.
Over the years I have shared the following prose poem with many friends who are close to their mothers. I gladly share it with you today and hope you like it. If you do, consider copying and pasting it into a Word document and printing a copy for all the mothers in your life.
A few weeks ago, I went online and began Googling for the prose poem about mothers and made an amazing new discovery about this beautiful piece of writing, a discovery that didn’t occur until 50 years after I first heard the prose poem read on Cleveland radio. The author of the prose poem, as it turned out, was not only known, but she was a very famous celebrity. For as it turned out, this beautiful piece was written and published by the universally loved Erma Bombeck, who published the piece in her daily newspaper column. The year was 1974, one year before I heard it for the first time on that memorable drive through Cleveland. If you were one of the many that wore yourself out on reading this long intro to Erma’s prose poem, the loss is yours, not mine.
“When God Created Mothers”
When the Good Lord was creating mothers, He was into His sixth day of ‘overtime’ when a Production Department angel appeared and said, “We’re still waiting for blueprints, Sir. You’re doing a lot of fiddling around on this one, Sir.”
God said, “I know, but have you read the specs on this order?”
“She has to be completely washable, but not plastic; have 180 moveable parts, all replaceable; run on black coffee and leftovers; have a lap that disappears when she stands up; have a kiss that can cure anything from a broken leg to a disappointed love affair; and six total pairs of hands.”
The angel shook her head slowly and said, “Six pairs of hands … I’m sorry, Sir. There’s no way we can do that.”
“It’s not the hands that are causing Me problems,” God remarked, “it’s the three pairs of eyes that mothers have to have.”
“That’s on the standard model?” asked the angel. God nodded.
“One pair that sees through closed doors when she asks, ‘What are you kids doing in there?’ when she already knows; another pair, here, in the back of her head that sees what she shouldn’t, but what she has to; and of course, the two here in front that look at a child when he goofs up and they say, ‘It’s okay. I understand, and I love you’ without so much as uttering a word.”
“God,” said the angel touching His sleeve gently, “Go get some rest. Tomorrow is …”
“I can’t,” said God, “I’m so close to creating something that’s close to myself. Already I have one who heals herself when she’s sick; can feed a family of six on one pound of hamburger; and she can get a nine-year-old to stand under a shower.”
The angel circled the model of a mother very slowly. “It’s too soft,” she sighed.
“But it’s tough!” said God excitedly. “Can you imagine what this mother can do, or endure?”
“But, can it think?”
“Not only can it think, but it can reason and compromise, too,” said the Creator.
Finally, the angel bent over and ran her finger across a cheek. “Uh oh, Sir, there’s a leak in it.” she announced. “I told You, Sir, you’re trying to pack too much into this model.”
“It’s not a leak,” said the Lord, “It’s called, a tear.”
“What’s it for?”
“Well, it’s for joy, sadness, disappointment, pain, loneliness, and pride.”
“You are a Genius, ” said the angel.
Somberly, God whispered, “That’s the whole thing … I didn’t put it there …”
― Erma Bombeck, When God Created Mothers, 1974