It's Never Too Late to Listen to Your Mother

By Fred Bruning

March 30, 2025

Broccoli rabe is an acquired taste, let’s agree, but should you steady yourself and order a portion at the local pizza joint, the rapini, like all New York pizzeria menu items, will arrive in an aluminum foil take-out container (doesn’t matter that you’re eating in) with airy Italian bread and two, if you get lucky, three, foil-wrapped butter pats.

In the continuing story of, “Sooner or Later, We All Become Our Mothers,” I have begun taking the butter pats home to await an English muffin in the morning, or occasional French toast, aware that a milestone has been reached.

At long last, like mother, like son.

I am undecided on Next Life issues, but, if there is a second act, Mom is smiling – attaboy! – while doing whatever occupies her sweet self in the hereafter, maybe Pinochle with Uncle Jack and Aunt Ann, or making blitz torte, or just taking a celestial stroll in those funny little pumps she wore everywhere, once while hiking from the Battery at Manhattan’s southern tip to Central Park.

“What’d you do this weekend, Mom?”

“Took a walk with Aunt Edna.”

“Great, where?”

“The city,” said Mom, referring to Manhattan as though Brooklyn was the suburbs.

“How far?”

“Bowling Green to Columbus Circle,” said Mom, then 85, meaning the end of the island to 59^th Street and Broadway – five miles, according to MapQuest.

Mom was a generous individual who preached forever that it was better to give than receive and easily parted with what little she had.

That’s why my wife, Wink, and I laughed quietly at her habit of taking home various freebies – paper-wrapped soap bars from hotels, salt and pepper packets, sugar pouches, jelly samples, tiny bottles of McIlhenny Tabasco, and, of course, butter pats slipped into her pocketbook after lunch at the diner.

“Quite a collection, Mom.”

“Oh, I just can’t stand to see anything go to waste.”

This, of course, has to do with Mom (Winnie) and Dad (Fred) living through the Depression.

A collection of Mom’s letters and spiral-bound journals we came across attested to my parents’ blue-collar backbone in those downhearted days of bread lines and hard knocks.

I haven’t seen Mom’s entries for a while – tucked away somewhere – but remember one in particular.

“Don’t know if we’ll get paid this week,” Mom wrote, as I recall. “But Fred and I went dancing. Home at two in the morning! Aren’t we something!”

When the worst was over and paydays again included paychecks, the old survival tricks stayed put, rooted for a lifetime.

Save bacon fat to grease the griddle. Ivory soap ends for the dishwater. Darn your socks. Hang out the laundry. Turn off the lights. Don’t let the faucet run. Clean your plate!

“Waste not, want not, right, Mom?”

“Just me,” she’d say.

I remember all this on Friday nights when Wink and I go to the pizza place for a couple slices, broccoli rabe, Prosecco for Wink, chianti, for me. At the end, we pack up leftovers, butter included.

“Mom would be so-o-o proud,” says Wink, a bigtime conservationist, herself, who, just for instance, uses paper bathroom cups until the sides collapse and bottoms fall out.

“Pretty soon, I’ll be asking for extras.We may never have to buy another pound of butter.”

The thing about Mom, too, was that she never seemed much tempted by what the world had to offer.

She took to heart the 10^th commandment emphasized by Pastor Werner Jentsch at St. John’s Lutheran about the sins of covetousness : the neighbor’s manservant or maidservant or ox or – oh, how we Sunday School kids giggled at the next – his ass, or, anything that is thy neighbor’s, including, by the way, his wife. (Wife? we wondered. What was that about?)

Sure, Mom and my father had dreams that went bust – a couple tries at their own delicatessen; a steamship cruise that never left the dock; an apartment on Shore Road where you could see Staten Island across the water – but few complaints.

More the opposite, really.

“We have so much,” Winnie would say, reading the paper about woes around the world. “Other places, people suffer.”

As noted, I can’t shake doubts about heaven and eternity. But just on the chance:

Hey, Mom. Holy cow, I’m almost your age now. Took a walk the other day. Four miles. Catching up.

Previous Invisible Ink posts at: https://fredbruning.substack.com/archive