Wake Me Early Mother. . .For I'm to Be Queen of the May

AA Grapevine® - Our Meeting in Print Online May 1950
May. . .The Merry Month of! Season of Poets! For me it used to be an in-between time of indecision on how I wanted my gin! Should it be in the winter's Martini--or switch to Tom Collinses?

Also, for me personally, the calendar makers should have called it May-hem! For it was a month of arguments, of the skull-cracking variety! I got crowned all right--often and with force! In my personal campaign against commercialized holidays, the second Saturday night in May was always a critical time. It was Mother's Day eve!

Mother's Day, in my book, remains the most cowardly of all the trumped up holidays. In Mother's Day the high pressure publicity genius has fashioned, with diabolical cunning, a little gem, foolproof! Raise your voice against it -- and you're blaspheming motherhood itself! In my desire to protect the masses against itself, I'd open my yap and wha' happened? Some monkey down at the end of the bar immediately decided I was reviling his mother -- and wham! Crowned again! And not Queen of the May either!

Philip Wylie it was who said this nation is degenerating under a self inflicted disease more subtle and devastating even than alcoholism. He calls it 'Momism', the unbridled worship of woman for performing perfectly normal physical functions.

My own mother would buy Wylie's theory. She ran our household with an iron hand just as surely as my pop thought he ran it! Surrounding my mother with a lot of sentimental, gooey, and useless trappings on a certain day would seem to me like helping Joe Louis cross a street.

If there was one member of our family who was thoroughly capable of taking care of herself, it was my mother. And I have a notion that this is pretty generally true in all families.

Yet tradespeople have put the arm on us and nobody, except misguided individualists like me dares say them nay! To them, Mother is a quaint old Whistler-type dame in a knitted shawl, helpless unless we ply her with flowers, candy, nylons -- and mink coats!

All this is pretty terrific material for a saloon soliloquy. I remember one M.D. eve in my favorite bar. I thought 'Let's have some excitement!' I put my views in re M.D. on the air. Even Gus the bartender who shared my views on the Brooklyn Dodgers, the 4th dimension, Einstein's theory and the sanctity or vice versa of marriage -- even Gus turned on me like a wounded stag. Ma started celebrating 'her day' by bailing me out of the hoosegow!

Where others may have had a 'mother fixation' I seem to have acquired a 'Mother's Day fixation'. It was the one commercial holiday I could never do anything with. Valentine's day was as easy for me as 'Prevent Foot Callous Day.' But Mother's Day, Ha!

In fact, one of the biggest drawing powers of AA was when I was told that it was on Mother's Day 1935 that Bill first met Dr. Bob; that the good Doctor, nicely plastered, arrived home with a gift, an outsize rubber plant suitably potted. His entry into history and posterity was accompanied by a fall which busted the rubber plant -- craaash!!!

"There," I said, "is a man who knows what to buy for Mother's Day. Something durable. Something that will bounce! There's a man who knows how to combine a good drunk with a proper gift. This must be the outfit for me, this AA!" And it is, too -- up until now!