September 9, 2005


Meet my mother-in-law, quirks and all

By Dona Nichols
Times Columnist

Everybody loves Raymond but not everybody loves their mother-in-law. This is no big surprise as mothers-in-law have received a bad rap since daughters-in-law and sons-in-laws came into existence.

I will admit that my own mother-in-law was the inspiration of about half of my stand-up comedy routine. I simply cannot ignore someone who gives me a book titled “Your Colon is Your Friend.” My colon has been a lot of things to me, but never have I considered it a close personal friend.

Frozen feathered friends
Even if I were to ignore the fact that her voice was a dead ringer for Minnie Mouse’s, I would still be faced with the inside knowledge that she always had a can of tuna in her purse and finches in her freezer.

That’s right, cute little frozen finches all lined up in the freezer because, as she put it, euthanasia is the humane way to end a sick bird’s life. Sticking the sick little finches in the freezer was the simplest way to do this.

“That way they just go to sleep,” she said. I used to tease her that when her “time” came, we’d have to clean out the freezer to make room for her.

It wasn’t just dead finches that filled her freezer. There were dead lizards, frogs and snakes amid the assortment of frozen peas and corn.

Sometimes she’d dissect them to determine what was wrong. My husband, Ralph, said all the kids in the neighborhood used to come watch her cut open the miniature specimens for scientific study.

160 live chickens
Besides the dead birds in the freezer, my mother-in-law had lots of live ones in her back yard, too. It started with one lonely rooster who needed female companionship. It ended up as a cluster-cluck of 160 chickens, and get this, my in-laws don’t eat eggs.

Every time my mother-in-law said that she had given away a few chickens and was making efforts to reduce the numbers, I’d remind her that the chickens weren’t the problem, it was the roosters.

“But Dona, hens can store sperm up to 10 years,” my mother-in-law said.

This little-known fact is twice as amusing coming from my mother-in-law’s Minnie Mouse voice. But regardless of that, the ability to store sperm for 10 years is pretty darned impressive.

Over the years she’s had great fun with phone solicitors who always thought she was a child because of her high-pitched voice. Once when a solicitor asked to speak to her mother, she replied softly, “My mother’s dead, my father’s dead and two of my brothers are dead.”

“Oh my gosh, you poor little thing,” was all the solicitor could say.

Frugal roots
My mother-in-law was a product of the Great Depression, which basically means she has successfully squeezed 37 cents out of every quarter.

A few years ago a visit to the dentist yielded two 24K gold fillings. She told my husband that these fillings were so valuable that he would have to promise her he’d have them removed upon her death.

“I’d feel kind of weird hanging around the funeral home with a pair of pliers to pull out your teeth Mom,” Ralph said.
Once at McDonald’s I asked her if I could get her anything.

“No, no, I’m fine,” she said in her meek little voice. “But if you don’t mind I would like some water … with a wedge of lemon.”

“Water with lemon? No problem,” I said.

“And if it’s not too much trouble, you could grab some “Sweet’N Low” too,” she said. “That way I can make lemonade.”

Her strategy for getting free lemonade at McDonald’s was only the beginning.

Collector
She saved everything. In fact, I recently found the first piece of string she ever saved and it was still intact, as were the three tons of collectibles she managed to hoard away over the past five decades.

If you asked her about the rusty old gates lying beneath the rubble in her back yard, she’d tell you all about how she acquired those beautiful and ornate works of art from Merle Oberon back in the forties when she worked at Technicolor. She couldn’t tell the story of the gates without giving you the complete filmography of Merle Oberon.

Every piece of rubbish had a story and every story took 20 to 30 minutes to tell.

She had grandiose plans for all this junk. She would sand and paint the Merle Oberon gates and make them the centerpiece of her newly planned driveway. The three-legged table merely needed a trip to the local cabinetmaker to give it new life.

How did I get such a mother-in-law? Good karma and lots of good luck. Really. In fact, Ruby Ann Nichols might be considered the yin of my yang when it comes to mothers-in-law.

Think about it … for a person like me who makes my living by finding the humor in quirky people like her, this was a match made in heaven.

Now she’s gone and I miss her.

No, she’s not in the freezer. And no, Ralph didn’t pull the gold out of her mouth, although he did admit to thinking about it and getting a quick laugh amid the painful sorrow of her death.

The Merle Oberon gates are still at the bottom of a heap along with the three-legged table. Neither of these things got the new life they were promised.

For a little old lady from Mobile, Alabama, she got around. She was with me for the birth of all my children and again when they were christened. She was there for both my college graduations and she was the first to comfort me when my father died. Even my own mother missed half of the above-mentioned events, but not my mother-in-law.

Just before she died I was cleaning out her freezer and I felt something sharp prick my finger. I dug through the frozen debris and pulled out a frozen rooster, feathers and all.

When I asked her why she had a frozen rooster in the freezer, her answer was so simple I’m amazed I didn’t think of it myself.

“I was going to perform an autopsy on it,” she said.

I guess that won’t happen either, but I’ll tell you this, if you don’t appreciate your mother-in-law, quirks and all, you’re missing out on one of life’s greatest gifts.

Dona Nichols teaches journalism at San Jose State University and does stand-up comedy on the side at the Improv in downtown San Jose. She lives in Evergreen with her husband and three children.