You can't win

by Jack Black

All the boys in the school, and there were fifty of them, lined up and gave me a noisy send-off. The old coachman clucked to his horses, and I was off for the train—and the world.

Any reader with a spoonful of imagination can picture me going home, then to other schools in turn, then to some sort of an office job; advancement here and there, always leading a well-ordered, quiet, studious life, until he finally places me in the respectable and responsible position of librarian of a metropolitan newspaper. That’s the way it should have been, but wasn’t.

The course I followed from that convent school to this library desk, if charted on a piece of paper, would look like the zigzag line that statisticians use to denote the rise and fall of temperature or rainfall or fluctuations of business. Every turn I made was a sharp one, a sudden one. In years I cannot remember making one easy, graceful, rounded turn.

It has often been a question with me just how much the best of it a boy has, who has his mother with him until his feet are well planted under him; who has a home and its influences until he gathers some kind of a working philosophy that helps him to face the world. There is no substitute for the home and the mother.

It may not mean much to the average chap to have a friend say: “John, I want you to meet my mother.” To me it means more than I can put on paper. It seems to explain to me why the man who so proudly says, “This is my mother,” is so many things that I am not and never can be. The insurance people have not yet got to the stage of insuring a man against a lifetime of failure, but if they ever do, I imagine the chap who can guarantee them that he will keep his mother with him until he is twenty will have a shade the best of it when he pays his premium.

I am not lugging in the fact that I was left motherless at the age of ten to alibi myself away from anything. Nevertheless I think a fellow has the right to ask himself if things might not have been different. My mother died before I got very well acquainted with her—I doubt if any child gives its parents much thought before the age of twelve or thirteen.

I probably thought that my mother was a person put into the world to scrub my face and neck and to be screamed and kicked at; to put scratchy, flannel rags around my neck with smelly grease on them when I had the croup; and to stand by the bed and keep me in it when I had the measles. I can remember distinctly how angry I became when she brought me a nice, new toothbrush and showed me what to do with it.

This was the greatest indignity of all—the last straw. I threw the thing away and refused to use it; told her up and down that I was “no girl” and wouldn’t have any “girl things.” She did not get angry and scold; she just went on with her work, smiling. She may have been pleased with my manly outburst. I don’t know.

I don’t remember that I was shocked or pained when she was buried. I cried, because it was expected of me. Mother’s relatives, a couple of sisters, whom I never saw before or since, were crying. I saw tears in my father’s eyes. So I tried to cry, and did. I know my father realized what we had lost and his grief was genuine, but I could not feel it then.

A few days later father sold our little cottage home and furnishings and we moved into the only hotel in the little town. Schools were few and far between for poor children then. I played around the hotel all day, running wild, till father came home from work. He would have his dinner, read a paper, and then put me to bed. After that he would read a book for an hour and go to bed himself. We lived this way for almost a year. Some nights he would put down his book and look at me strangely for minutes at a time. I was a problem, undoubtedly, and he was trying to decide what to do with me. A ten-year-old boy without a mother is a fit problem for any father’s mind, and my father was a thoughtful man.