#483: A Mom Thing

My mother was not Jewish
but would often use the name
of the traditional wine
as if it were a swear word.
She’d exclaim in frustration,
“Manischewitz!”
I never learned why
she did this, nor did I know
what the word meant
and I never asked.
Only after she died,
and I was thinking
about all the oddball
sayings of hers, did
I learn the origin
of the word. My mother
was not a curser, so my best guess
is that she would find words
or phrases that to her ear
sounded like curses but
were not. “For crying in a
bucket” was a favorite of hers,
and this one, “Manishewitz,”
was her other go-to exclamation.
In the 1950s, when my mother
was a young woman, a song
came out by The Crows called
“Mambo Shewitz.” Apparently,
the wine was also popular
with black American doo wop singers.
She may have listened to that song,
but it’s doubtful, as my parents
had no black music in their
record collection that I can recall.
I cringe to think that her use
of the word was a kind of slur
aimed at blacks or jews,
but in that era, I suppose, that
kind of thing would not be unusual,
and my parents were hardly revolutionaries.
I don’t remember anything explicitly
racist or anti-semitic ever passing
through their lips, grandpa’s racism,
not eliminated, but having been
seriously diluted in one generation.
I find myself writing poems
about ways in which I have become
like my parents. It’s inescapable,
it seems, and luckily, only a few
of their bad habits are mine. Like Mom,
I have caught myself, but not out of an aversion
to cursing, yelling out nonsense words
in frustration or anger–the impulse,
I guess, to cushion the strong emotion
with humor–and that’s totally a
Mom thing. I’ll sometimes replace
the curse word with some mundane
noun–that way anything can sound obscene
if it’s said with the right intention.
Door knob! Fire escape! Rubber chicken!
But when I’m truly angry, like when
the dogs escape, or when the tax bill arrives,
I’ll just let the fucks fly
and that is something my mother would never do.
We take our parents with us wherever we go
but some things we leave behind, or augment
to suit the new era or a new kind of thinking.
I happily carry my mother’s fondness
for nonsense cursing and a silliness
that I will likely never shake.