Drugs and debt

My mother retired last month from her job as office manager of a law firm in Savannah, Ga. It wasn’t an easy decision. She’s 86 and liked going into the office every day. She didn’t even mind the 40-mile round-trip commute too much.

What decided it for her was her boss, who is 20 years her junior, decided to slow down. He’s thinking about selling his building — on a downtown square — to Savannah College of Art and Design. Maybe cutting back to three days a week. Maybe more. By the end of the year, there probably wouldn’t be an office to manage, he told her. He was pretty tired.

He offered her a generous package. They threw her a nice party.

So now Mom has a lot of time for her great-grandkids, and for my sister who’s going through a health crisis. She drives her to chemo and in the afternoons they sit around and watch CourtTV. Mom is deep into the trial of South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh.

She says she understands how a husband could kill a wife (or vice versa), but can’t wrap her mind around the idea that a father would kill his son.

She has opinions, but is keeping an open mind until all the evidence is in. “Drugs and debt” can make you do terrible things, she says. She tries to stay away from drugs and debt. So far, she’s done OK. She takes some medication for bursitis in her right elbow; she uses drops for her eyes. Other than that, she’s clean.

Not everyone in her family has stayed away from drugs and debt. So some weeks she drives west of the city to the area of Seed Tick Road in Pembroke, near where she grew up, to bring one of her younger sisters — the only one of the four who ever had problems with drugs and debt — a loaf of bread or a carton of cigarettes.

Sometimes she gets cussed for her trouble, but there you go. “I’m not completely heartless,” Mom says.

Mom also goes to a lot of the great-grandkids’ games and activities. Her oldest great-grandkid Kodi is a cheerleader at Kennesaw State University near Atlanta, which goes to show me, since I on more than one occasion expressed doubts that all that traveling for cheer competitions would ever pay off. (Kennesaw State is the second-largest university by enrollment in Georgia. It has more students than the University of Arkansas or Louisiana State University. The football team, the Owls, had an off season last year, compiling a record of 5-6. The University of Central Arkansas beat them 51- 24 in October. It wasn’t because of a lack of pep.)

Mom cheers for Kodi, but most of her attention are on her great-grandkid Breyton’s basketball games. In his last game, 10-year-old Breyton scored 19 points. He hit five three-pointers. His team lost, to “the best team in the league.”

(Given that your average 10-year-old would need a trebuchet to even hit the rim from a regulation high school three-point line, I am assuming that Breyton’s league is playing on rims somewhat lower than regulation, and the three-point line is about eight feet away. My brother-in-law wants to argue with me about it and says Breyton is the next Pete Maravich. I could be wrong. After all, I was wrong about the cheer business.)

Mom, an astute basketball analyst from having been a high school All-American in her playing days at Ellabell High, is of the opinion that Breyton’s team needs to work on ball-handling skills.

“I tell them that they’re not supposed to let the other team take it away from them,” she says.

I point out that the fact that Breyton’s usage level seems extraordinary high, given that he seems to consistently score 90% of his team’s points. Maybe someone should clue him into some Steve Nash videos on YouTube? Maybe he should get his teammates involved a little more? Maybe let one of the other kids shoot?

“Oh, they’d just miss it,” Mom says. “Breyton sounds like a little gunner,” I tell Mom.

“Sounds like someone I know,” she says. I remind my mother that I was a pass-first point guard and that the one time we played together — in a charity game in 1982 or 1983 — she was our (victorious) team’s top scorer with 19 points. Because I knew exactly when and how to get her the ball at the elbow.

(Mom was a defensive guard in high school, which in those days meant she never crossed midcourt to attack the basket. So her ability to get buckets surprised me — she had a soft set shot. She grannied up her free throws like Rick Barry.)

Breyton’s individual statistics notwitstanding, Mom admits the losing has gotten old.

“I can’t wait for baseball season,” she says. “That’s a lot more fun to watch.”

She’s not spending her retirement merely watching; her sister Lois has organized a trip to Waveland, Miss., later this month. Mom’s entertaining friend Paula and her boyfriend Gerald are driving over from Louisiana. If the weather’s not too bad Gerald and Lois’s husband Ken will play golf.

Which means Mom and Lois and Paula will hit the casinos.

I know they have casinos in Waveland because I read Frederick Barthelme’s novel “Waveland,” set in the post-Katrina wilderness of coastal Mississippi. While I don’t remember the novel “Waveland” having much casino gambling in it (it was about some burned-out architecture professional and his dangerous girlfriend, who may have had a hand in her ex-boyfriend’s demise, driving around and watching a lot of television — yeah, those are the sort of books I like) I associate it with gambling because I know Fred’s history.

Fred, who for decades was the editor of the Mississippi Review, and his brother Steve (also a writer of some note — their older brother was the late great postmodernist Donald) are mad gamblers who blew through their inheritance in the casinos on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. (Adding indignity to injury, they got indicted for conspiracy to defraud a Hattiesburg casino. They were later exonerated.) So when I hear Waveland and of the writing Barthelme brothers and their adventures in the windowless realm, I know what’s going on there.

“Don’t go losing my inheritance, Mom,” I say. “Keep away from drugs and debt.”

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ll probably just stay in the hotel room and play board games. I just hope they have CourtTV.”