It's Payback Time, Ladies

by John Ettorre

Sandy & Sophie.

With alliteration such as this, they could have been a long-running lounge act at the Holiday Inn, featuring a pair of bawdy dames belting out show tunes for lonely traveling salesmen. Or perhaps the title characters of one of those weepy, melodramatic afternoon soap operas that no one admits watching.

But for me, those names summon a pair of icons of my youth. Sandy was my friend Jack’s mom, and Sophie was my friend Tom’s mother. They jointly hovered over my adolescence like a pair of winged goddesses, raining down pixy dust with their magic wands, dispensing joy and fond memories. Mostly, I remember what fun we had with them, and how comfortably they intersected with their sons’ lives.

And—alas, a story as old as the rivers, I only came to appreciate how powerful a hold they have over my imagination after they were gone. We lost these two amazing women to death recently, just a few months apart.

There’s a truism about kids when it comes to parents: they tend to idealize their friends’ parents just as readily as they casually dismiss their own. Name any parental characteristic or habit you can think of. For kids, it’s likely to drive them crazy in their own parents even as that same quality can seem intriguing in someone else’s parents. After all, your friends’ parents often represent a kind of exotic parallel life to that of your own family – except for the dullness and embarrassing ways in which your own parents can drive you to distraction. Or so you imagine as a kid.

And boy, did Sandy & Sophie give me plenty about which to be intrigued. Sophie was a pint-sized Greek, a little bantam rooster of a gal, breezy and impossibly good-natured, given to laughing easily at the silliest things even as she’d grow grave and comically concerned over a seeming trifle. She drove one of those ancient ‘70s Buicks, her head barely breaking the plane of the windshield.

Her son, a psychology professor and game inventor, recalled recently how she nourished his creativity, "always lavishing attention on my homemade comic books and other projects. To my delight, she often put my creative endeavors ahead of my responsibilities at school!" That was Sophie, all right.

Sandy was a different type entirely, but no less interesting. She was a brassy Jew from Queens, a transplant to Cleveland. She and her husband Stanley operated a real estate business from their basement, a reasonably exotic thing in the ‘70s. Sandy wasn’t quite a gum-snapping smarty, but she was certainly more given to blurt out what was on her mind than, say, my own mom. She famously wore a short black leather skirt to my wedding, raising a few eyebrows in certain oh-so-serious corners of the room. But I loved it. She was being her usual peppy self, taking me for a manic whirl on the dance floor as she sent me off to my next phase of life.

Sandy loved her "Jackie" (my friend) like you wouldn’t believe. He could do no wrong, and his buddies instantly got the same treatment. It was as if we had been adopted, only without having to go through all the boring paperwork. While I was generally eager to escape my own house, I could sit for hours at Sandy’s house, talking and laughing about everything and nothing, gossiping about girls or hearing titillating tales from the front lines of the real estate wars. I could be myself, in all my teenage angst and confusion, and know that I wouldn’t be judged poorly for it, but would win nothing but warm affirmation, just like at Sophie’s.

Of course, my friends and I tended to congregate at these two houses, since mothers set the emotional temperature of a household. Kids naturally gravitate to where cool mothers preside (you can’t fool a kid—even the dimmest adolescent in America, while blindfolded, can smell a cool parent from 100 yards away).

Over the years, I have asked people if they got the chance to tell their parents what they really wanted to say before their parents died. And now I regret not having done so with Sandy & Sophie.

I didn’t get to tell either of you this (though I think you could have guessed as much), but today I know that you formed me and shaped me into an adult and into the parent I am. You instructed not by what you said so much as by what you did, by the example of how you lived, and especially of how you loved. Even that blindfolded kid I once was could sense that your love was so pure, given with no conditions attached. The most remarkable thing of all was that you had so much of it available, and that after you had spilled all that love into your own kids, you seemed to have plenty left to rain down upon my head.

So now that you’ve passed on, I’m going to do the only thing I can do to begin to thank you properly, dear ladies. I’m going to find some other kids to spoil with that same kind of love and warmth, or at least the nearest facsimile I can summon.

It may not be very original, girls, but I’m going to pay it forward.

John Ettorre is a Cleveland-based writer and editor who has also worked in Washington, D.C. and Chicago. Over a 20-year career, his writing has appeared in more than 70 publications, including the New York Times. His online weblog, Working With Words, can be found at www.workingwithwords.blogspot.com. To reach John, send e-mail to: jettorre@voyager.net or leave a message at (440) 708-2994.