Mice Don't Like Wheat Bread:Classic Words of Wisdom from Joan

I love my mom. No, really. Sure, she gets on my last nerve sometimes, and she can be as stubborn as I am, which leads to arguments that become standoffs. But she keeps life interesting.

Every now and then something will come out of her mouth that is so hilarious that I titter every time I think about it for weeks afterwards. She doesn't try to be funny. She just is. She has a unique way of looking at the world that is both hopelessly clueless and naive and agelessly wise. When one of these gems come along, I have to tell people. It is, as the credit card commercials say, priceless.

She had one today that got me pretty good, and provided a few laughs between me and Jason at the dinner table, and it got me thinking back to her greatest hits. With today's included, here are the top 5 "Joan-isms" of all time.

5."Mice won't eat wheat bread."
This was today's quote. Mom has a mouse in her house, and it's been making Scout nuts and eating all her food for a couple of weeks now. She gave up on that poor-excuse-for-a-cat catching the mouse and broke down and bought mouse traps today. She asked Jasonand I to come over and bait them for her. We agreed. A few minutes later she called and asked me to bring the hotdog buns she knows we have leftover from grilling out for bait, and not the wheat bread she knows we eat, because "Mice won't eat wheat bread." Wha? She was adamant about this. I always thought mice ate, you know, whatever was lying around. Heck, I had one in my office two years ago that ate my Slim Fast bars. Don't they eat grain from silos? I would have thought wheat bread would have been right up their alley. Apparently, Mom thinks her mouse has her taste for refined carbs.

4. "I guess I have to switch to Diet Coke." (Said while eating her third powdered-sugar donut of the morning.)
Mom's had heart trouble and has been trying to get her cholesterol down. It has come down, but her triglycerides are still too high and her doctor just told her she's probably getting too much sugar in her diet and could be at risk for diabetes. The above quote was her solution; however, as she was scarfing down her usual breakfast of Coke and donuts as she was saying it, I'm not sure she gets it. Ah, irony.

3. "It's a Mexican cat. It doesn't understand English."
Years ago a Mexican family moved across the street from Mom and Dad. Pretty soon they had a kitten roaming around their yard (and everyone else's on the street.) I saw it in the street one day and tried to call it over; it was a cute little thing. Mom told me she thought they brought the cat with them from Mexico ("It doesn't look American," she said) and warned me against calling it over using English. 'Cause that's really the only thing that was stalling my communication with the cat. If I'd hollered out, "Venga aqui, gatito!" it would have come running. All you have to do is speak the cat's native tongue and it will obey. Everyone knows that. (And I have been wondering ever since: what exactly are the physical differences between Mexican and American cats?)

2. "The tire's only flat on the bottom."
This was my dad's favorite story to tell on Mom. She went out to start her car one day while Dad was at work and she had a flat. She called my brother-in-law to come look at it and see if she had a spare. He came over, and he's quite a joker, so after realizing it would have to be towed in he left her with, "Don't worry about it. It's only flat on the bottom." Hours later, Dad came home and sat down to eat and ask about the car. She repeated what Tim had told her, utterly sincere, utterly believing that it would be easier to fix. Dad looked at her for one moment, mouth agape, not believing she was serious, and when he realized she was, he burst out in a laugh I can still hear to this day. We were crying before we could stop. Every time the whole family gets together, someone brings it up.

1. "Nobody can't never tell you nothing."
She said this to me when I was a teenager during an argument, and Jason was present to hear it. It's his favorite. When we talked about it later, we counted the negatives: a quadruple! Wow. I couldn't have come up with a sentence using a quadruple negative if I tried, but she did it...effortlessly. And since it's a quadruple negative, it's really a positive, right? It's a compliment: Somebody can tell me something. And I'll listen. I have no idea why she was so angry over this.

I hope I haven't made my mom sound...well, dumb. She's really not. I've had intelligent conversations with her about everything from the secret to cooking a good mess of green beans to civil rights to common childhood illnesses. She loves reading and learning about surgery and medicine, and we tell her all the time she missed her calling in the medical field (I think she would have made a terrific pharmacist if women in southeastern Kentucky in the 60s had been encouraged to do anything higher-reaching than beauty school, which she finished.) But like many other smart people I know, she lacks common sense. And she tends to open her mouth before she engages her brain. Mix those traits with a small-town girl's naivete and throw it all into a well-worn cast-iron skillet, and you get my mom. And conversation that's never dull.