Hey Mom Page 2
Here’s the question people always ask me: What does it mean to be number ten of eleven? With nine older brothers and sisters and just one younger? Is there something particular about a family with eleven children? Some “eleven-ness”? Robert Kennedy Jr. is one of eleven children, so is Stephen Colbert, so is Mel Gibson. Do we all have something in common beyond just the number? I wonder if there’s something similar between RFK Jr., Mel Gibson, Stephen Colbert, and me. I’m funny and Stephen Colbert is funny. Is Mel Gibson funny? Is RFK Jr.?
Do we tenth-borns have any special tendencies, the way firstborns might, or the baby of the family does, or the middle of three, or an only child? Does birth order matter that much? I have a book at home that’s all about birth order, titled—what else?—The Birth Order Book, by Dr. Kevin Leman. The subtitle is Why You Are the Way You Are.
Is it that black-and-white? Does birth order determine everything? What number kid is it that never finishes reading books?
I always wondered if being your tenth, Mom, meant it was really hard for me to come across as special. You were forty-one years old when you had me. Like many moms back then, you got a week in the hospital, and having babies was your only real vacation. No wonder you had so many!
I’m glad I could give you that break—but it was the tenth such vacation. With nine children already, could number ten really seem special? I know when I see something over and over how it affects me. Oh, another open mic comic. I’ve seen this before. The tenth baby? Probably I was like that for you and Dad. Another mouth to feed, another round of diapers to change, another soft cherubic crying thing to hold and comfort, more money to earn and immediately spend. It must have been chaos at 1122 Hazelwood Street, the Roosevelt Projects on the East Side of St. Paul, Minnesota, before I showed up, and even more chaos afterward. So could I really have been special in some way? After all, not every comic is special. Brave, sure, and I have a lot of respect for what each comic is trying to do. But special? Most aren’t. (Wait, is that me being judgmental? “I don’t need to see that comic to know he’s not special!”)
Eventually, someone comes along who is special, like the first time I saw Jim Carrey. Wow, I remember thinking. That’s going to be a hard act to follow onstage. At home I had nine acts to follow. The only act that followed me was Tommy. I really wish I had asked you and Dad how it felt to bring home number ten.
When fans or interviewers ask, “What was it like growing up with ten brothers and sisters?” I never know how to answer it. By the time I arrived, the older ones were close to leaving the nest and very busy with their lives outside the home. There was the thing with Mary and, a decade after that, with Shanna, so not all of them were even there.
The middle kids helped take care of us younger ones, so to me and Tommy, the middle kids were the older kids. And the older kids were really adults.
What was it like growing up in a family that big? I had lots of examples of how to act, good and bad. We had only six chairs at the table, so we ate in shifts. There were two bathrooms, so we learned to control our bladders. The socks we wore were probably not ours.
Every family’s circumstances are different. And I’m sure very big families are the same, in some ways. I wonder if Tolstoy is right, that happy families are happy in the same way but unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way. Oh, man, I would hate to try to figure that out. I know we had a lot of unhappiness. But were we unhappy in a unique way, or in a way very similar to other very big families? I ask too many damn questions. Anyway, Lisa probably said it best: “We made our own happiness but I don’t think we were a happy family.”
What were the reactions of Kent, Rhea, Mary, Roger, Jimmy, Shanna, Billy, Sheila, and Lisa to the ten-pound sack of potatoes carted into the Anderson Hacienda that March of ’53? I’m going to make some calls, to three of my four remaining siblings, Mom, to get their impressions. (Not Tommy, since he wasn’t born yet. But I’ll call him anyway, to say hi to my baby brother and tell him I love him.)
Four siblings. Yep, it’s sad to say it. Jimmy, Shanna, Lisa, and Tommy. I have more to tell you about Kent, Rhea, Mary, Roger, Billy, and Sheila being gone, Mom, but later, not now. Just writing those words gets me emotional.
To be continued.
Love,
Louie
Premiere
Hey Mom,
I called Jimmy, your favorite child (admit it), and asked him what he thought of me when I came home from the hospital.
“I was excited but I don’t know why,” he said. Jimmy gets excited about everything. He always looks on the bright side. I don’t know if he happens to be the best combination of you and Dad, or he arrived at just the right time, or it’s birth order, or he was sunny-side up and I’m more of a hard-boiled egg. Anyway, that’s Jimmy, pure and sweet, a sweetness he got from you, though he’s also got a side of Dad’s sour sauce.
Then I called Lisa but she didn’t pick up.
Then I called Shanna, to see if she was even around when I was brought home from the hospital. Maybe she wasn’t, maybe she was—that was years after you and Dad gave her away to be raised in a whole other state.
Shanna didn’t pick up, so I left a message on her voice mail. Hey Mom, Shanna’s living in your hometown of Mitchell, South Dakota. Home of the Corn Palace. Where you and Dad met. I think you know why she ended up back there.
Then Lisa called back. She said she remembers me coming home and she was super excited to see me, so excited that you let her hold me . . . and she dropped me on my head!
What?
Well, that explains everything, doesn’t it, Mom? Dropped on the head. I didn’t have a chance.
Being dropped on my head as a baby could explain my becoming a comedian. What’s the right recipe for producing comedians—is it nice moms and mean dads? Mean moms and nice dads? Is that how you make the best comedians? I did a joke about the difference between moms and dads waking up their kids in the morning for school. Moms are usually so gentle and nice, even musical, sweetly letting you sink yourself because they seem content to say your name seven or eight hundred times. “Louie . . . oh, Lou-eee? . . . Louie, there’s bacon and eggs, Louie . . . Louie, get up, everyone’s waiting for you, Louie . . . I even have orange juice (remember, Mom, how we couldn’t always afford orange juice?) . . . Louie, get up, please get up, Louie . . . LOOO-EE, I know you can hear me, Louie . . . Louie, sweetie? . . .”
Dads usually fire a warning shot or two. “Rise and shine!” “Hit the showers, then hit the road!” “Get up or your ass is grass!” “WAKE UP, DAMMIT!”
Seriously, Mom, I really do wish I knew what you and Dad thought of me when I entered this mad, mad, often really mean world.
Love,
Hardheaded Louie
Birthday Girl
Mom
Hey Mom,
It’s May 27, happy birthday! I won’t say how old you’d be now because you never liked that. Who does, after thirty?
Sorry, Mom, actually I do need to share it. If I show these letters to anyone, they’ll want to know. You were born in Mitchell, South Dakota, 103 years ago, in 1912. I just looked up the Argus-Leader, the newspaper from nearby Sioux Falls, and that day it was in the mid-70s to low 80s. There were still front-page stories about the Titanic, which had sunk exactly six weeks earlier. William Howard Taft was president, our fattest, at 350 pounds.
You couldn’t have been an easy birth because you were, like, a twelve-pound baby and your mom was such a tiny woman. That could explain the look on her face in those photographs. I wonder what your dad, Charlie, was doing when you were born. Was he at your mother’s bedside, squeezing her hand, or at one of the gas stations he owned? What was he like? Like Roger? Like me? Like Dad, somehow? Maybe I’ll call Aunt Shirley about the details. I never understood why we called her Aunt Shirley when she’s a cousin. I should ask Aunt Shirley why we call her Aunt Shirley.
Who came up with your name, Ora Zella? That’s a beauty, isn’t it? It wasn’t a very popular na
me—I looked it up. The top five girl names in 1912 were Mary, Helen, Dorothy, Margaret, and Ruth. There are lots of names in the Top 100 that year that you almost never hear anymore—Edna (#16), Bertha (#36), Fannie (#87), Velma (#88). But no Oras or Zellas among them. By the way, Mom, the top five girl names this year, 2015, are Sophia, Emma, Olivia, Ava, and Mia. Don’t they sound like names from the past?
Did you know anyone with the name Ora? Did you like having an unusual name? What did they call you in school and at home?
I know Dad had a Scandinavian background—Swedish, Norwegian, English—and his childhood was so much more broken than yours. When his older sister Olga babysat while their parents were away, and then she threw a party, and that local Swedish gang showed up uninvited and killed someone, it was hard to blame the authorities for treating Dad’s parents as unfit guardians, which led to the sad path his life took.
But do you think it would have been so, so different without that misfortune? I don’t know. No one does.
You, on the other hand—you had a pretty good childhood! Your people go all the way back to the Mayflower. (How big was that boat, anyway?) You came from the Windsors, a prestigious name in British history. Do you know where your ancestors migrated to, and when? Did they hang out in Massachusetts for a while? Are you curious how they ended up in South Dakota?
I know you were born in Mitchell, S.D., in comfortable circumstances, to a mother and father you called “very loving parents.” Your dad, Charles Prouty, owned filling stations, and you got to run the candy-and-cigarette stands. Al Capone once pulled into one of the stations, in a big, beautiful Packard, you told me, and gave the kid working the pump a twenty-dollar tip.
During the Depression, your dad extended credit to lots of customers but when the worst of it was over, many of them didn’t pay him back. It broke his business, then his heart. I also heard, growing up, about how your dad got cheated out of some of his stations by a crooked lawyer.
So I’m confused, Mom. Did he die of a stroke—as I heard sometimes—or, as you often said, “a broken heart”? If it was a broken heart, was it from disappointment in his customers and the flaws of human nature, or because he got swindled? Or was the stroke the result of some other despair?
Even though he experienced disappointment in his financial and professional life, I wonder if it couldn’t have been offset by the love he gave his wife and children, and that they gave him. Maybe Charles Prouty didn’t see that as an equal trade.
I know you learned to drive a car at age thirteen and your dad got you a 1929 Buick, making you the only girl in town with her own car. How cool! Did that make you popular? Were you the most popular girl at school because you had your own car and your dad treated you like a queen? What’s it like to be a popular teen? Good, I bet, really good. I wasn’t the least popular kid in school but I wasn’t the most popular, for sure, and I was usually picked last for teams, especially kickball. Gym was even less fun for me than it was for most kids. When you’re a fat kid, you don’t want to take your shirt off. Swimming, forget it.
But being the most popular, there’s no way to go but down. Wherever we go in the world, there are very few Most Populars, and the rest of us have to share the crumbs left over from the baguette of life.
That makes my mouth water, Mom. Especially if there’s a little dish of the butter of life.
So you were a girl in a small town, and Dad, my dad, was a trumpet player in a very successful band. His life was more dazzling but you had the car. And you thought he liked you. At least your car. Did you ever go with Dad to his gigs? He must have been great to listen to, and even to be around. Was he the only one you saw up on stage? When did the heavy drinking start? Did you see flashes of it and just tell yourself it was manageable? Was there anything he could have done right then, as you guys fell madly in love during the Depression, that would have made you walk away? You never gave up on him. Why is that? Was it love for him or just some Prouty sense of determination?
See, Mom: so many questions! Maybe too many. I’m so sorry now for those times I ever told you to shut up because you were going on and on, like on the thirteen-hour flight we took together to Europe.
Where do we get our strength from, Mom? From our parents? Or do we have it all along, inside us, and sometimes we just give others credit for it, even though they had little or nothing to do with it?
Boy, talk about people who need to shut up.
Love,
Louie
Dad, Mom, Uncle Perry under the tree, and a menagerie of Andersons
Training Day
Hey Mom,
On my flight today from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, they announced that they were training a pilot to become captain!
Who trains moms, Mom? Is it their mothers? How was your mom, Bertha, as a mom? Bertha Prouty—I don’t even know her middle name. That’s terrible. I should know more. Was she as loving as you? I doubt it. I met her. She lived with us a while. Why didn’t I ask her everything?
Think of how much I lost by not asking all the questions I wanted. When do we lose that tendency? Because as kids we’re constantly asking. What is this for? Why? Mom, how did that baby get in your stomach? What color is water? Do ants poop? Do ants name their children? Why can’t you toast salad? Where did grandpa go? Why do I sometimes get sad and start crying and don’t know why? How? What? Why? Kids know instinctively that asking questions helps them. They may not know consciously but they know that the answers will help them to understand the world and find their place in it and handle disappointment and money and success and the flu, and what to do with vegetable scraps and stale bread. Well, stale bread is easy. Just make stuffing with it or give it to your dad because he’ll eat anything.
A question I wish I’d asked you, Mom: What the hell were you thinking marrying Dad?
Okay, I know. You got pregnant. Your parents weren’t happy about it. You and Dad had to marry. That’s what people did in the 1930s.
Still, if you said that was the reason you married Dad, I probably would have interrupted to say, “He was such a difficult man!”
No, that’s not true. I would have said, “He was such a fricking difficult man!”
But was he as difficult back then?
I remember once asking you, “What did you see in him?”
“I loved his curls,” you said. “He had beautiful curly hair.”
I didn’t comment on your answer then but I know what I would say now. “Oh, Mom, now I know where I get my shallowness!”
Sure, Dad was handsome. You were beautiful. Your father owned gas stations. You had a car. And Dad wanted a ride.
What I really should have asked you: “What the hell were you thinking having eleven children?”
People should ask their parents everything. But parents should also tell their kids everything. Would they even listen, though? Did I listen?
Ever-questioning,
Louie
A Dozen Questions Every Person Should Ask Their Parent or Parents While They Still Can
1. Was your childhood a fairy tale, a drama, or a horror film?
2. What was your first thought when you two saw each other?
3. Why did you marry each other? Out of necessity? Were you lonesome?
4. What were you looking for in life? What did you feel you needed to do?
5. What did you already have, so you didn’t need to look for it?
6. If you could live a do-over, what would it be? Would you change yourself or other things about your life?
7. What’s the best thing you ever did besides have me?
8. If you could do three things to change the world, what would they be?
9. If you could have only one meal, would it be breakfast, lunch, or dinner?
10. What characters in movies were your mom and dad most like?
11. How did you know what I would like so much?
12. Tell me something you’ve never told anyone.
Silent Dancing
&nbs
p; Hey Mom,
We did this thing that’s pretty cool, I think. Remember “silent dance” parties, where everyone on the dance floor wears headphones and listens to the same music and dances to it, but there’s no music outside? Wait, no, actually you wouldn’t—that’s not even my generation! I don’t know whose generation it is, the one after mine, or the current one. Anyway, silent dance parties. (I can hear Dad raising his voice: “What the hell will they think of next—silent screaming?”) So that idea gave me this one: What if we transmitted the audio of one of my Vegas stand-up shows, live, to the local VA hospital, and all the injured and recovering vets who want can listen to it on headphones, and there would be laughter throughout the building? I sure hope there would be laughter.
They did it, Mom! We did it! At the Las Vegas VA hospital. I wish I could have heard it and seen it myself but I was onstage performing live what they were listening to. Hey Mom: If you tell a joke and no one’s listening, does that mean it isn’t funny?
I’ll get a chance to meet some of the vets next week, when I go to the hospital for a “meet and greet.”
We need to do more of that. I want to get other entertainers to join. Why don’t we all make a better effort to treat our veterans like we do our loved ones?
On second thought, given some families, that wouldn’t be such a great idea.
Love,
Proud son of a war veteran, Louie
You and Me
Hey Mom,
Remember when we would venture out early Saturday morning to Flying Cloud Airport, just you and me, for the flea market? Most times it was a quiet ride there, with our packed boxes in the back of the big Buick. Sometimes it was a pleasant mother-son conversation. Once, we fantasized that a rich antiques dealer from California was going to stop by our booth of pottery, glassware, and jewelry, surveying the “treasures” (your word; “junk,” Dad’s word), and then, with a sudden magical sweep of his arm, the dealer would say, “I’ll take it all!” Then he’d unsnap his fancy alligator wallet and open it up to reveal a thick wad of hundreds, to your amazement and my teenage giggles.