Gloria Jones Alvarez: The strength of convictions and the mirth of malapropisms

My mother carried a gun that could drop you in the blink of an eye. It was the index finger of her right hand and she had dead aim. When I didn’t want to hear whatever redundancies she happened to be preaching, I’d threaten to bite it off.

To which she’d screw up her puss and say, “Just try it…”

I never did, but once – quite young – I tied a piece of ribbon around her pointy nose while she was sleeping. She was quick to remind those who made mischief at her expense (mostly me) not only that they weren’t funny but they didn’t even know what funny was.

She could be hilarious – an East Baltimore Mrs. Malaprop – and rarely on purpose. A favorite was her twist on the British adage of stoic endurance. When one of us was going through a rough time she’d say, “Keep an upper lip!”

In the three years or so we took care of her after a year of taking care of Dad, we did. Mom passed a week after her 89th birthday on December 22. Now that she’s gone, I’m thinking about all the things her hands accomplished.

Lots of kids got a piece of fruit in their grade school lunch. I was the only one with an orange already peeled. Others got Tastykake. My brothers Danny and Victor and I unwrapped slices of whatever goodie she’d baked that week.  Mom cooked so well — everything from miniature chocolate eclairs to her take on pastitsio – that readers of her January 10 obituary in the Baltimore Sun said the story made them hungry.

She helped me collect pennies to benefit Poe Baltimore; and, alongside my father at the kitchen table (where my brothers and I were often summoned for “round table discussions” about crucial matters like how long we could grow our hair) she stitched the binding of chapbooks featuring my early short stories.

With energy to burn – “I have my highs, I got my lows,” she explained – Mom gardened with gusto in the backyard of our Linthicum home. The modest suburban lawn was a hundred times bigger than the cracked spit of concrete behind the four-room rowhouse where she grew up at 2729 Dillon Street in old Canton.

The brick rancher down the street from St. Philip Neri Church was my parents’ dream house, the hard-earned reward for Manny and Glo, two working class kids who fell in love at Patterson Park High School in the early 1950s.

For neary 60 years they kept it spic-and-span and in fine working order, hosting hundreds of birthday, anniversary and holiday parties. Christmas Eve – with Mom’s pierogi, Galician empanada and paella – was the event of the season.

You want your candles on a pineapple upside down cake? You got it.

After my ’76 senior prom at Mt. St. Joe, on the far side of midnight, my folks served breakfast for me, my date Jeannie Goebert from down the street and a couple of classmates. Two of my teachers attended, got bombed and didn’t leave until the sun was coming up.

“Stay as long as you want,” Mom often told guests deep in conversation and many rounds of “refreshments” with Dad. “I’m going to bed.”

Minus the teachers, extravagant meals were common, featuring chopped clams with onion, garlic and breadcrumbs baked in their shells; Rosemary Chicken; Athenian string beans a la Ikaros and, after dinner, black coffee with Anis del Mono. This was when Dad was home from the tugboat engine rooms in Fells Point. When he was on Thames Street we had gourmet leftovers.

Mom grew up eating none of this, fondly remembering the pinky-sized breakfast links her hard-drinking father fried in onions and brown gravy (skillet grease and flour) with mashed potatoes for dinner. Raised Polish Catholic in the waterfront parish of St. Casimir, “Glo’s” high school yearbook said she aspired to be a housewife. With just a bit of education, she could have run a small company. But only if they did things her way.

Mom’s true religion was house cleaning. Once I asked why she vacuumed behind the sofa, allowing that “nobody’s going to know.”

She thundered, “I’ll know.”

In college, when I’d come home on the other side of 2 a.m. after a night of riding around Little Italy and Fells Point with my friends, I’d find her at the kitchen table in her nightgown with her checkbook, bank statements and what my father called her “Polish pencil,” a portable abacus filled with hot lead.

Bleary-eyed, I’d stand at the threshold and ask what she was doing.

“Looking for a couple of nickels they owe me,” she’d say. “They ain’t gonna cheat Glo.”

Her bravado (Mom had the heart of a lion though she was often at the mercy of her fears) extended to any product she didn’t think delivered on its promise. If slighted, she’d write the bastards a letter.

Once, she suffered two bad cans of Hanover baked beans – which my dad used for his hot dogs and beans party staple – in a row. Get out the stamps and envelope! Not only did she receive a coupon for more beans but they sent her an apron emblazoned with the company logo.

As a 1980s and ’90s executive secretary at Baltimore-Washington International Airport in the operations division, Mom (without asking permission, she’d have made a great reporter) consolidated the sick leave of her colleagues to give to co-workers fighting cancer at home.

When someone protested that it wasn’t kosher, she explained the situation in a letter to then-Gov. William Donald Schaefer. Like Willie Don, Glo was from the “do it now” school. The governor gave her the green light and she never looked back.

Her “I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do whether you like it or not” attitude can be summed up in two words that my good friend Kerry Hawk Lessard will never forget. 

“Along with my grandmother you’d be hard-pressed to find a more authentic Baltimore hon than Glo,” said Lessard, who grew up near Saint Agnes Hospital where Mom got her hearing aids, forgetting that if she didn’t put them in it was pointless to yak-yak-yak to whomever was around.

“Like my grandmother Evelyn or my Aunt Hazel, Glo dispensed hard truths with a sharp eyebrow and an even sharper tongue,” said Lessard, “but you could never doubt their genuine affection for you.”

On one visit to the Alvarez home, Kerry was boo-hooing to Mom about a recent breakup.  She recalled Glo “looking me dead in the eye, raising a finger and saying, ‘You know what I’d tell him? If you don’t like it you can smell me!'”

It immediately became one of Kerry’s go-to kiss-offs. As for malaprops, Kerry always brought her daughter Emma when she visited Mom and Dad. One time after they left, Glo was trying to remember the girl’s name, saying, “You know, the cute kid with the blonde hair. What’s her name? Edna?”

Now a grown woman, in certain circles she will remain, forever, Edna.

Nope, nobody – be it a multi-national bank, a grocery store or the big shots at BWI – was gonna cheat Glo. In the end, however, she cheated herself.

In the 1940s, not long out of grade school, it was fashionable for young women to smoke cigarettes and Mom indulged the habit with the ardor of an addict. When she scrubbed the floor, there was an ashtray next to the bucket.

In January of 1980 – 43 years ago this month – I was a 21-year-old clerk in The Sun sports department assigned to format each day’s mid-Atlantic horse racing charts. The job was easy and I used my free time to freelance stories. One was about the Jews for Jesus movement, then getting a lot of attention via Bob Dylan’s supposed conversion to Christianity.

The day I learned that Mom had a cancerous lung tumor I was interviewing a woman named Betty Grodnitzky, a Jewish cantor who had taken Christ – Yeshua – as her savior. I haven’t spoken to her in decades and don’t know if she still identifies as Christian. Back then, she was on fire for the Lord.

When I told Grodnitzky what was going on with Mom she stopped the interview and asked if I wanted to pray. Why not? In those days lung cancer was a death sentence.

Standing in the middle of the old fifth-floor newsroom on Calvert Street when The Sun was truly a great newspaper, I listened as Grodnitzky prayed on the other end of the line, all around me reporters, editors and copy boys rushing to get the next day’s paper together.

One thing that Grodnitsky specifically prayed for was the flesh around Mom’s tumor to be “clean and healthy.” When the surgery was over, doctors told us that, while malignant,the tumor was “encapsulated.” Once removed, there was no need for chemo or radiation.

What did Mom do with this good news? She began smoking again. Manny, nearly all of his life the bedrock that Mom never had with her own father, threatened to leave if she didn’t see a shrink. Such behavior, he reasoned, had to be insane.

She went and she quit smoking for good. Dad stayed and we had Glo around for another 40 years to tell us what to do.

Rafael Alvarez will be reading at Snug Books, 4717 Harford Road on Saturday, February 17. He can be reached viaorlo.leini@gmail.com