A lot of people called her Violet, which isn’t that surprising since that was her given name. An old-fashioned name that you don’t hear much anymore, which is too bad, especially if you like flowers.
Other friends, and there were many, called her Vi.
All my cousins and close relatives always called her Bydie, which is sort of a strange thing to call anybody.
It seems that one of the relatives, possibly one of her three sisters, called her that when she (the sister) was very little and was learning to talk and when she couldn’t pronounce “Violet” it came out as “Bydie.”
Tons of family and friends called her that term of endearment all her life, and she loved it.
My Dad was the only one who called her Smitty, as Smith was her maiden name. It was his pet name for her and for some reason it always made me happy when I heard it.
I just called her Mom.
Tomorrow is Mother’s Day but it doesn’t take a special day to remember my Mom, she was special on every ordinary day, and still is when I think about her on the good days and the bad days. Nobody’s perfect, but I think maybe her biggest fault was spoiling her rotten kids — especially her son.
But you always knew when she was around, let’s put it that way. A high-energy, type-A personality if there ever was one. There was never a dull moment around our house. Especially if there was an important event, like a birthday or Christmas or an Edmonton Eskimo football game on TV.
At first, she didn’t understand football, so she wasn’t a fan, and things were generally considerably duller and much quieter in those days.
Then Dad opened Pandora’s Box one night at the big yellow table at the old house in Parkvale. He got me to fetch my toy box of little plastic creatures — farm animals, African safari beasts and various scary dinosaurs, and he mapped out a football field on a big piece of paper in the middle of the table.
He set out the plastic horses and cows, lions and tigers, tyrannosauruses and stegosauruses as two teams of opposing players on the football field grid on the table, brewed a pot of coffee, rolled half a dozen cigarettes and proceeded to explain the game of football to his curious Smitty.
Moving the little plastic halfback chickens and defensive-end pterodactyls around the field as the Calgary Stampeders took on the Edmonton Eskimos in a classic battle of Alberta on our dining room table.
A couple of hours later, the room was filled with smoke, the coffee pot was empty, and the rooster quarterback had just passed to a giraffe for a touchdown, and my Mom whooped with a eureka moment that nearly quite literally raised the roof.
“And that’s six points, and rooster’s team goes for convert now, right?!” she exclaimed, and we knew that she finally understood the game.
What we didn’t know is that it would change football for all of us in the family, too, and for anyone within a two-block radius in the neighbourhood. When a football game was on, it was impossible to get any peace and quiet on account of the unbelievable cacophony emitting from our house.
Because from then on, after she chose to love the Eskimos (probably because their star quarterback Jackie Parker looked somewhat like a rooster when he ran), she made as much noise on her own as the entire crowd at home game.
She was the team’s loudest, most intense cheerleader, and nobody loved the excitement of football more that Bydie.
But a lot of it rubbed off on me. I think it’s part of the reason I loved playing football every weekend with my buddies at Coronation Park, running fancy plays and tackling each other for hours on end, with only fairly minor injuries requiring very little hospitalization.
And I signed up for city league tackle as soon as I was old enough.
The first year I broke my thumb, the second year I broke two fingers, but as soon as I quit crying every night from the pain, I was back on the field with my arm and hand wrapped in a big ball of foam padding. I looked like I had a bowling ball on my arm, so it was no surprise that my tackling stats went way up.
And guess who was on the sidelines happily yelling bloody murder at every play?
And my Mom was what you might call ‘spunky,’ although you don’t hear that term much anymore either.
I remember when the city bulldozer came to remove the spruce trees from in front of our house. We had boulevards — another thing you don’t see much anymore — boulevards with spruce trees evenly spaced along the whole street — standing like the D-line of the Edmonton Eskimos, each as tall as a person.
Somehow, someone “downtown” had the bright idea to remove all the spruce trees that had been planted only a year or two before. Nobody seemed to know why or what to do about this ridiculous notion — nobody except my Mom.
When the front end loader got to the first tree, lowered the scoop bucket to dig out the tree, my Mom stomped out of the house, walked straight over and stepped into the bucket, crossed her arms and wouldn’t move. True story.
In the ensuing lengthy kafuffle involving various authorities, Mom finally came out of the bucket and the digger drove away and the trees were never touched again.
Now it’s been over two decades since both Mom and Dad have been gone, but I’m lucky this Mother’s Day and every day that I have a Mom-In-Law that is my Mom Two.
Shirley is as special as they come and she isn’t even named after a flower. She doesn’t raise the roof yelling at football, but she plays a mean piano and treats her daughter’s husband like a much-loved son. That’s how lucky I am.
So here’s to mothers everywhere, may every day be Mother’s Day.
I was thinking about all this when I found myself driving slowly down 45th Street the other day. And as I passed the two-storey grey house in Parkvale, I couldn’t help but notice that the boulevard spruce trees are now over 10 metres high, standing taller than the houses. I like that.
And when I drove away and glimpsed our big old house in the rear view mirror, I swear I could hear Bydie bellowing at the top of her lungs, urging Jackie Parker on to another touchdown.
Harley Hay is a local freelance writer, author, filmmaker and musician. His column appears on Saturdays in the Advocate.