Story Time

When I was little, we used to live in Yakima, Washington. At the time, there was a Nordstrom and a mall downtown. One Sunday, my mom took my sister and me shopping, a passtime they thoroughly enjoyed. As we were headed back to our parked car in a downtown lot, a woman in jeans and a tshirt carrying a handful of toiletries was trying to walk away from a man pleading or arguing with her, certainly trailing her a bit like a lost, grumpy puppy.

Two things happened that I remember on this walk back to the car. One, my mom started singing hymns loudly in her rich alto voice. Two, the man said something to the woman that sounded a lot like “I’m not just one of your johns.” Put a pin in this.

We got to the car, my mom locked the doors and clenched the steering wheel. At first her shoulders were really strained and tight. She had been trying to protect her girls from the darker elements of the world. And then, her shoulders started shaking, not with fear, but with laughter. For whatever reason, this moment in time was a key that unlocked a previous mystery.

My sister and I looked in wide-eyed wonder at our mom trying to figure out what just happened between the walk to the car, the hymn, the man and the woman fighting, and now our mom’s laughter. When she finally collected herself, she proceeded to tell us a story that didn’t seem to have any connection.

“Months ago, I was volunteering at the Red Cross here in town.” (Mom was an RN and a teacher, so often did volunteer and missionary work.) “A man came in to donate blood and he was very good-looking and reminded me of my dad.” (Mom’s dad was named John Jensen. Her brother is named John Jensen, Jr. One of her sons has the name Jonathan in his full name.) “So I told him, you look like a John to me.” To my mother, this was high praise. This was an honorific. This was a compliment of the highest order. You remind me of my dad. That’s beautiful. Except, she explained, the man gave her a dirty, quizzical look as if to say, “what the heck do you mean by that, lady?!”

And now, instead of looking through a glass darkly, all was revealed and my Mom connected the dots in the most MariAnne fashion. It’s one of my favorite stories of her because I can so relate to the naive earnestness getting turned on its ear in the funniest way. She was smart and worldy and simultaneously very innocent and she could chuckle at her own foibles. It’s the only way to proceed.