Mom Can Tell Between Dogs, Greyhounds

She is standing in front of the Greyhound boarding line at the bus terminal. She is talking animatedly to a young man standing behind her in line. She is laughing and cooing and tilting her head like the Southern belle she will always be. She is talking about me.

I know this, not because the two of them keep glancing my way and grinning like idiots. I know this because my mother is in the habit of pimping me.

Not in the technical sense, of course.

But my mother, like any good Southern mother, believes with real conviction that without her intercession, I will never meet a suitable man.

Perhaps she’s right. Too many unsavory choices of the male variety have soiled my dance card over the years. She’d politely withhold drawn-out editorial comment, proffering instead a lilting, one-word judgment that spoke volumes: “Honnnnn-ey,” she’d say, shaking her head and clucking her tongue, effectively cutting off my attempts to sell her on some loser I saw as a prince.

But still, the bus depot? Why not. To her dismay, my eyes drifted from the friendly young man she’d isolated for further study to a trim-looking bus driver in tight-fitting gray pants, aviator shades and some nifty Harley Davidson boots. Nice teeth. Confident strut. A bad dog indeed.

As he hurled bags into the luggage compartment, I casually said, “He looks like he could kick some butt.”

“What do you want to know about him?” mom asked, offering up bits and pieces she’d unearthed on her frequent journeys between Spokane and Yakima. From her sleuthing I learned he owned several planes. Had driven a bus for 27 years. Had property in the Southwest. But was he single? I wondered aloud.

“Honnnnn-ey,” she said, in a different sort of tone that spoke volumes not at all about his loser status but about his age and its relation to the year of my birth.

The May-December dilemma apparently didn’t concern her at a community concert we attended together in Yakima a few days before I moved to Spokane. We went to hear the Cassidys, a popular Irish folk group. Its members looked to be born anywhere between the mid-‘60s and the year when St. Patrick drove the snakes from the Emerald Isle, but who was keeping track? Certainly not mom. After the concert, she purposefully approached them, groupie-like, to introduce herself.

By the time I caught up with her, she’d already launched her pitch to the assembled brothers Cassidy.

“In our family, we have a Shannon, a Kevin, a Maureen and a Kathleen,” she said, grabbing my arm and drawing me closer. “Oh, here’s Kathleen. She’s single.”

I wanted to die.

Thankfully, the brothers were quite gracious and forgiving of mom’s boldness, as are most men who fall under her spell. The ones who end up enmeshed with our family don’t know that she views them first and foremost as interesting research, subjects to be observed and categorized.

Any man who has ever dated a Gilligan girl has his own 3-by-5 index card in my mom’s possession, complete with his vital statistics, telephone numbers where he can be tracked, and all sorts of interesting tidbits about his life, such as “Has small white dog, coarse-haired named Koda - bad breath,” or “Two credits too short to graduate (May ‘87). Summer school?”

Men who find out about this habit marvel, then laugh, then start to feel uneasy, which I’m sure is her ultimate “don’t mess with my daughter” objective, bless her heart. My sister says that she no longer mentions new men to my mom, because even if she offers up only his first name, down it goes on an index card, with a question mark in place of the surname mom will fill in later.

It could be worse, I suppose. She could be writing personal ads for us headlined “I’m her scout.”

And some day, when we want to look back on our dating histories, it will all be right there on mom’s recipe cards, brutally honest and chronologically organized.

Call it pride, but I just hope the final entry on one of those blasted cards doesn’t start with the words, “Found this one while trolling for Kathleen at …”

, DataTimes MEMO: Kathleen Gilligan is Lifestyles & Trends editor of the Spokesman-Review. Contact her at 459-5481 or kathleeng@spokesman.com

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Kathleen Gilligan The Spokesman-Review