Don't mess with Mom

a cautionary tale from the Great White North

Back when we lived in Fort McMurray in northern Alberta, my mom hosted a weekly radio show (Mom was in Fort Mac from about 1977-1980 before she decided it was way too cold for sane humans to live so close to the Arctic Circle). She had a massive collection of traditional folk music albums from all over the world and she had this show called Helga’s International House of Music. What with her German accent and all, she sounded pretty legit as an international folk music guru. Not that there would have been much competition for the job in Alberta’s oil patch in the ‘70s…

During her hour each Sunday night she’d say a bit about where the music had come from, the artist, the musical tradition, and maybe provide a bit of context or trivia and then she’d spin the disc (or whatever the lingo is for that stuff cool DJs used to do). Not that Mom fit the sterotype of a cool DJ - she had four kids, ran a business (Fort Fast Foto, the first photo processing place in town), plus taught photography a the local community college…

During commercial breaks, she’d play the pre-recorded ads (weird side note, I was a copywriter at the same radio station at the tender age of 16 - how that happened is another story… and, my brother got his start in radio working the midnight-to-dawn shift before heading off to classes at the local junior high school). Anyway, the point about the ad-playing is that when she wasn’t reading the weather, or doing a time check, or doing her intros and outros, she would have a few minutes to catch her breath before the next thing had to happen.

During one of those intervals, one of the hip young DJs (at least, he thought he was pretty cool), walked in with a shirt in his hands.

My mother exploded and tore a strip of the young guy who, according to my mother, never had the nerve to look her in the eye again when their shifts happened to overlap.

I can imagine he would have gone to great lengths to avoid Mom after that. She probably went to great lengths to glare at him and perhaps make lewd gestures in the general direction of her chest. She was nothing if not fierce when she was crossed. Her sense of right and wrong and her righteous indignation when she felt she had been wronged were legendary.

Needless to say, we all (including Dad), sewed on our own buttons.

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For those of you who have been checking in on a more or less daily basis since the start of this project on Jan. 1, my apologies for the radio silence over the past few days. I’ve been dealing with some frustrating business stuff (in a COVID pivot, I started doing some real estate investing and I have a couple of deals in Texas that are proving more interesting than I would have liked), some annoying dental and medical stuff (nothing serious, not to worry), irritating tax prep stuff, and, yes, drawing away. The drawings, though, weren’t telling stories - so, I didn’t want to fill up space here just for the sake of filling up space. I’ve been drawing things like scribble monsters and daily diary entries, all inspired by prompts from Lynda Barry’s book, Making Comics, which I mentioned the other day. I’ve also been reading, cross-country skiing, climbing, cycling, getting a spare room ready to rent… In other words, LIFE! Which brings me to the Easter Weekend and, with any luck, I can settle back into a more regular posting groove. Hope you enjoyed the wee break!