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| Lillian Edith Clark (nee Lohse) 1929 - 2005 |
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| Lois Marna Clarke (nee Mills) 1935 -2016 |
In celebration of the two fun-loving women we both called mom, enjoy this rerun from 2012 of a rerun from 2010:
The first year my family lived in Edmonton (about 1966-67), we took up residence in a duplex at the corner of 120th Avenue NW and 122nd Street.
On Fridays during the summer of the year that we lived at that address, my older sister Cathy and I would walk about four blocks over to the Safeway on 118th Avenue, trailing a bundle buggy, and wait for mom to get off the bus from work. Then we'd help her with the grocery shopping and go home together.
On one particular Friday, I was in the Safeway, with the bundle buggy, waiting for mom and minding my own business the way only a daydream-prone ten-year-old can, when a woman I didn't know and had never seen before grabbed my arm. She was very angry - with me apparently - and accused me of stealing her bundle buggy.
A note on my experience with grown-ups when I was a kid: grown-ups came in four main categories: my parents; my friends' parents; teachers and strangers. I further categorized strangers into two groups: those who knew my name (friends of my parents, for example) and those who did not. All grown-ups were skittish and unpredictable - I never knew what was going to set them off - but the most skittish and unpredictable were the "strangers who didn't know my name."
So, back at the Safeway on that long-ago Friday afternoon, I was in the clutches of a stranger who did not know my name, who was accusing me of a crime I barely understood (lady, I have a bundle buggy; why would I take yours?), my sister had disappeared and mom was nowhere to be seen.
I think I tried to explain to the angry woman that the buggy in my possession actually did belong to me and that, when my mother arrived, she would say so, too.
Persuaded only by the conclusions she had already drawn about me, the angry woman enlisted the assistance of the store manager, who took me into his office, sat me down and started to interrogate me about my desperate criminal scheme to steal the lady's bundle buggy. He was kind but also convinced that I had stolen the buggy I still had in my possession and nothing I said seemed to change his mind.
Before long I couldn't do anything but cry and, between sobs, protest my innocence.
Then mom and Cathy came into the manager's office and everything changed. The angry woman backed off completely. The kind store manager apologized to my mother and gave the angry lady a buggy from the store's display. He said, genuinely perplexed, "we'll never know what happened" to the angry lady's buggy.
Having related this story forty-five years later, I think I know what happened. The angry woman never had a buggy. Instead, she saw a defenceless little kid holding onto one and she hoped that prevailing social prejudices about thieving children would make her claim to the buggy more powerful than mine.
But she made a mistake in thinking I was defenceless. The difference between my parents and all the other skittish, unpredictable grown-ups I encountered when I was a kid was that I knew that mom and dad were on my side. And I never doubted -- when I was all of ten years old, during those awful moments when that random stranger accused me of being a thief -- that my mom would come and stand up for me.
Thanks for reading!
Happy Mother's Day!
Karen
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