Shock & Awe

Within a week or two of our arrival in Mesquite, Texas, my mother took a phone call from a strange voice that claimed to be connected with the mob. He said if she was not on the next plane back to my stepfather, Bus, in Ohio, they'd throw acid in her face and hurt my sister and me.

The threat hit home with my mom, not just because she was a beautiful woman who didn't want acid thrown in her face. She probably still held out hopes of launching her singing career. By now she'd performed in night clubs and actually sung on television, albeit in the wee hours of the night during a telethon broadcast by a station in Steubenville.

And she wasn't simply reacting instinctively, as any mother would, to a threat toward her children. But my stepfather, Bus, though Irish, had somehow ingratiated himself with the Italian mob, and in the short time she'd known him she learned his friends were capable of such things. So she flew back to Ohio.

Not long after, still living with our dad in the little rental house in Mesquite, my sister and I began getting regular mail from her: cards, letters and, on the appropriate occasions, extravagant gifts, best of all an entire set of encyclopedia. Perhaps more than ever before, I thought my mother loved me. I had the papers to prove it.

But I was still eleven and didn't yet know all that stuff about Bus and the mob and why we fled Ohio in the first place. I just knew my mother had chosen to return to this cranky, sleazy older guy instead of staying in Texas with us. I decided how I would get her to come back. To my eleven-year old way of thinking, responding to her cards, letters and gifts would simply indicate I was okay with her not being my mother anymore, so instead I would show her how hurt I was and not respond at all. I would hurt her and change her mind and then she would come back to me.

Of course that didn't work, and my mother and I would have to wait more than a decade to see each other again and to reconcile our relationship.

But that was more than 30 years ago. Yesterday, on Thanksgiving Day, I sat silently and watched family members respond to people they loved, but in a way calculated to change them: somewhat sarcastic comments made out loud as if to joke, but with a very unfunny edge. And I thought back to my plot to change my mother, then to more recent plots to change a close friend, or a business associate, or my wife, and then about others' plots to change me, all by means intended to hurt, to shock someone into changing. I wanted to interrupt, and say I'd never seen this tactic work, but I didn't.