Everything you never wanted to know

My mother visited this week and informed me that one of my previous columns may have been exaggerated a bit. While recalling an incident where my mother drove her Mustang off the side of a snowy mountain pass road in Montana, many years ago, I said the vehicle suffered little to no damage and my mother walked to a nearby emergency phone to call for help. In reality, the vehicle suffered disabling damage consisting of a broken axle and needed significant body work as well.

My mother didn't crawl out of the vehicle, after it launched off the roadway into the pine tree forest and came crashing to a halt, she was stuck in the car.

A passing driver of a semi-tractor somehow saw her and risked getting stuck or injured himself, by stopping his vehicle and tromping down the hill and through the forest to her vehicle to see if she needed assistance. The snow was so thick my mother couldn't get the car doors or windows open and would had been in serious danger were it not for the man helping to free her.

My mother still found the column humorous and enjoyed an extra laugh or two at my expense, while educating me on "what really happened."

She would very much like me to believe I simply mixed the facts up over the years, but I know better. I am all too familiar with her secretive ways.

Just last week someone asked me her age and I was forced to admit I didn't know.

"Bruce! You don't know your own mother's age!" I was chided.

Every year, for as long as I can remember, I would ask my mother her age on her birthday, and every year she gave the same response, "I am 29."

I found it to be a cute response when I was younger, but now that I am an "adult," her super secret ways have branded me as a son "who doesn't know his own mother's age."

Considering her reputation, I am confident my previous version of the accident matches what my mother told me at the time. After all, I was 35 before she admitted to me the dog we had while living in Montana, Buster, didn't really run away one day and simply not return. He had become very old by dog standards, and after a lifetime of being one of the sweetest dogs we had, he tried to eat the Montana Power guy one day.

I recall my mother telling me afterwards how terrible she felt. A young man knocked on our door and said he needed to read our power meter in the backyard, but he was worried Buster, our pure-bred Staffordshire bull terrier, was going to bite him.

My mom said she walked the young man to the backyard and as she was opening the chain-link gate was babbling on to him about how sweet Buster was and that he would never hurt anyone. Just as soon as she cracked the gate open Buster burst through it, in attack mode. The power man was saved from injury only by his clipboard, which he shielded himself with and Buster promptly sank his teeth into it before my mother could grab him.

It was the first time Buster had ever attempted to bite a person, and the final of several months worth of incidents where Buster displayed increased aggression in his old age.

A few weeks later he ran away and never returned, or so I was told.

It was more than twenty years later, during a conversation with my step-father when I finally learned the truth.

"I wonder what ever became of old Buster, he was such a good dog. He must have been hit by a car or something," I said. I felt like a naive child after my step-father responded by telling me that he and my mother had decided it was best to put Buster down and they didn't want us kids to be saddened by the ordeal so kept it a secret.

I understand my parents' motive and desire to protect their children from anything that would harm or sadden them and I am confident that is exactly how my memory of my mother's Mustang accident became so erroneous. She never would have admitted to me she was trapped in the car, that she was in any real danger, in her eyes that would only cause me to worry about her even more in the future.

As a parent, I will likely do the same when presented with a similar scenario, however, given my recent embarrassments I think I will plan to disclose all such childish secrets to my children on their high school graduation cards.

I have never been much of a fan of greeting and holiday cards and the only part of my graduation cards I paid any attention to was the money inside. I find myself a little excited at the prospect of an "everything I never wanted you to know" message scribed on my children's graduation cards, especially given my history of parenting blunders, that should definitely spice things up a bit.

It will be several years before I cave in to Declan's requests for a puppy, and McCook has very little that compares to the mountain pass roads of western Montana in the winter, but something tells me I may still need to shop for a couple of oversized graduation cards.