My mother had a brand new Cadillac.  Once every other week she would need to go to town.  Her home on Lake Huron was also off a highway.  She was 5’2″ tall and as thin as wire.  I went with her on a few occasions.  She was afraid of the airbags in the car.  She adjusted the seat as far back as she could go and still put her toes on the accelerator and brake pedals.  Her arms were stretched out straight on the steering wheel.

I was alarmed over this method of driving.  “You will more likely have an accident driving this car with your toes, mom.”  My mother had a unique ability to ignore me.

She pulled out of the driveway and dashed across the highway to the gravel shoulder.  Once clear, by triple checking, she hit the gas onto the highway.  To my horror, she pressed cruise control when the car hit 70 miles per hour toward the small town.  God helped her avoid hitting anyone or any thing.

She tapped on the brakes to take the car off cruise control and signaled that she intended to turn right. This she did slowly and semi-truck horns blared on the highway to protest this move.  There was a grocery store and a K-Mart. We wandered through all the aisles of K-Mart. Small, she went to the teen girls’ section of clothing.  Her style sense was that of a fourteen year old girl.  She wore really short shorts and tube tops.  She also wore jazzy shoes.

Together we did a complete inventory of all the stock at K-Mart.

Next, we would go to the grocery store.  She pushed a cart like a battering ram.  I always needed diapers for over a decade.  “I’ll pay for them.”  I always said.  She went aisle by aisle and bought the same things, depending upon her appetite obsession.  She threw a couple of boxes of instant “peaches and cream” oatmeal.  She bought milk, coffee, butter, and bread.  She spent time in the freezer section to select healthy, low calories microwaveable meals.  I ended up going to get another cart to shop for our four kids’ meals.

“You buy so much food!  Are you feeding an army?”  she always asked.  It irritated me but I clamped my jaws shut.  She then would get into it.  “Do they like Cheerios or Fruit Loops?  Is ___________still eating Shark lunches?  They all like grilled cheese, right?”

I relaxed a bit, until we hit the liquor aisle.  She put a huge bottle of cheap gin in her cart, and a single bottle of vermouth.  I said nothing.  I put a six pack of beer in my cart.  Once in front by the cash registers she stopped to get two cartons of cigarettes and one Lotto ticket.

All the cashiers knew her, and she introduced me to everyone as we checked out.  I remind you, it was a small town.  I put the groceries into her mafia sized trunk.  She lit a cigarette and watched me do this.

She would not smoke IN the new car.  Once again on the highway she used her toe to accelerate to 70 m.p.h..  She put it on cruise control and we headed home.  If she wanted a cigarette along the nine mile trip, she would spray gravel all over to pull off, get out of the car, and smoke on the shoulder of the road.  She turned on her signal and toe tapped the brake as we reached her driveway.  My knees were shaking when I got out of the car, and semi-truck horns on the highway blared their sentiments regarding her driving.

She put the groceries away, because she had an obsessive compulsive method of organizing the cupboards and refrigerator and its freezer.  I would stop the sandy kids from traipsing into grandma’s house until they hosed off.  My husband was “watching” them.  My mother had a method to her madness.  She bought gin at several locations so that none of the cashiers would know how much she drank!  I opened a cupboard and it was full of various sized gin bottles.

She opened the refrigerator and said, “Oh, I am almost out of olives!”

But, I had survived the trip.  I sent a sunburned husband to the tiny party and grocery store a mile away.  I did not have it in me to have my mother drive to that store.  My mother pressed money into my husband’s hand…”Buy me a small bottle of gin, I’m almost out.”