Street Seens: As My Mother Used to Say – A Heritage of Words
When friends and associates hear me say, “As my Mother used to say…” for the hundredth time they tend to note, “Either your Mother never stopped speaking – which, judging from you could have been a real possibility – or she uttered only perfectly quotable aphorisms.” It was a little of each. For years I thought that Momma’s “sayings” were common to all people who had grown up in Northern Ireland. Then I began meeting people from Northern Ireland and realized that her expressions were as singular as she. My Mother had the insights of an Aesop and a love of words that allowed her to dress them as tastefully as she dressed herself and her children. Someone beat me to the punch and published a book called “Momilies,” but the more I thought of the pithy sayings I recalled from my childhood, and the ones I garnered from Aunt Maggie after meeting her in my fully adult years, I realized that I should capture these sayings and pass them along to the descendants they met in this life and the ones who came after my parents had left.
It may be that some of the “sayings” were ones shared in common with others of their time and place. But even that demonstrates a real and loving respect for the power of words that was part of the air they breathed in County Tyrone, or Illinois. I have reason to believe that a good number of them were original, especially the one I chose for the title of a tiny Christmas gift I gave to each of my dear nieces and nephews some twenty years ago.
As I began recalling and writing down Momma’s sayings, the effort grew to include those of her sister, Aunt Maggie, and then crossed the Atlantic to include advice from our much more plain spoken father, one or two from his namesake and our only brother who died, too soon but left a treasury of words and ideas that can generate thought and laughter across the decades.
I found in these words a mosaic of memories as varied as the colors of the rainbow. Daddy’s eloquence was entirely different from Momma’s, but no less “on the money.” This was the man who comforted his children when their adolescent worlds seemed to be crumbling, “Don’t worry deary-darling, remember, God is a gentleman.” And when asked to travel the roads of the newly-minted Diocese of Joliet he encouraged his neighbors to share time, and treasure to help build a Cathedral with a “stump speech” that had as its theme, “God is never outdone in generosity.”
Their words were eloquent, and so were their lives. I hope this column captures a few hints about how and why that was. And I hope it stimulates more memories, from my family and yours, which can be treasures when invested with love, humor, faith and hope. The best result of this sharing will be the treasuries of remembered words that give new and lasting life to the days observed in your own, personal “Street Seens.”
SAYINGS OF THE SISTERS DOHERTY
About trusting in the Creator…
“God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.”
About a boringly big talker…
“He’s intoxicated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.”
About an inane person who laughs too much…
“It appears that the want of wit is a pleasure to him.”
About evading the telling of her age…
“I’m as old as my tongue and slightly older than my teeth.”
About people who settle for the lowest common denominator…. and in practice, about any person who might have spurned her child for someone she judged to be less “worthy”…
“Water seeks its own level.”
About not being disappointed when one of the aforementioned unworthy persons had hurt you…
“Consider the source.”
A description of being busy…
“She was as busy as someone minding mice at a crossroads.”
About perseverance…
“Remember, patience and perseverance got the snail to Rome.”
About not speaking up for oneself…
“A dumb priest never got a parish.” (NB: this is not to suggest dumb as stupid, but dumb as mute…. less elegantly expressed this equates to say nothing, achieve nothing; or say nothing and don’t be surprised if your return is exactly that, nothing.)
About not getting overwhelmed by the dimensions of a task….
“Come along now, remember, well-begun is half done.”
About predicting the weather….
“It’ll be a fine day so long as the sky shows enough blue to make a waistcoat for a Scotsman.”
About not “settling” when it comes to matters of the heart…
“I’ve given it a great deal of thought, and I have concluded that a clean want is better than a dirty breakfast.”
About moderation…
“They say that enough is as good as a feast, and I’ve had enough for a wise little beast.”
About a girl who looked pretty but spoke badly…
“There was once a princess who when she opened her mouth to speak; issued only roughly hewn stones…”
About warning you that what you were seeking might turn out to be a disappointment….
“Take care lest it be Dead Sea fruit.” She then went on to explain that fruit which grows far below sea level has a tendency to look shiny and attractive but to turn to ashes in the mouth.
About making excuses…
“It’s a poor workman who complains of his tools.”
About learning to sustain initial enthusiasm…
“Slow and easy goes far in the day.”
About failing to relate to your task with commitment, holding the outcome at a safe distance…
“ A cat in gloves catches no mice.”
About laughter that seems to have little basis…
“It takes little to amuse innocence.”
On the undesirability of the second-born child marrying first…
“Weed the garden as it grows.”
On avoiding mention of a “sore” subject…
“Don’t talk of rope to a man whose Father was hanged!”
About promises which seem not to be being kept…. or delayed gratification…
“Live horse, and you’ll get oats.”
About banishing anxiety about what can’t be changed or prevented…
“If you’re born to be hanged, you won’t drown.”
An all-time favorite from my brother Bill…
“Remember, the perfect is the enemy of the good.”
Another “pearl” from Bill on knowing when to hand in a term paper…or stop talking, or stop writing, or….
“It takes two people to create a masterpiece. One to do it and the other to shoot him before he ruins it.”
His advice on how to honor the detail-obsessed…
“Let’s have three cheers, evenly spaced, for the compulsives.”
Annette Cunningham’s Street Seens appears every Sunday.
