Category:

Mom had a harder childhood than Dad. While his family was spared the worst of the Depression, hers struggled. She was born near Longmont, Colorado, to parents with little money; she spent her early years in a small house with a sod roof. When she was around ten her family moved to Minatare, Nebraska, near Scottsbluff, where her father got a job as a mechanic in a sugar-beet factory.

She didn't have a happy home life. She didn't get along with her mother, whom she seldom spoke of, and saw even more rarely, later in life. She didn't have fond memories of Depression-era Nebraska, which she found bleak and boring. My brother Phil—our family historian—recalls: "She missed Longmont and Colorado terribly because it was in the foothills of the Rockies and beautiful, but the Minatare and Scottsbluff area was flat plains and drab, and the wind whistled and howled at night, which she hated. She made fun of life in Minatare, like saying going to funerals with her friend Gwen was the entertainment."

Gwen was my mom's friend and co-conspirator. They were not respectful of authority. My mom would tell us about the time they got into trouble in high school—as they often did—and a teacher told them, sternly, that they were going to stay after school for detention. Gwen turned to my mom and, in a voice radiant with joyful anticipation, said, "Oh, Marion, shall we?"

Mom loved that memory.

As soon as she was old enough to leave home, she did, and she never went back. She went to the University of Nebraska, working to pay her way. After she graduated she moved to Chicago, where she got a job as a secretary for what turned out to be the Manhattan Project, although as a low-level clerical worker she had no idea what that meant. Her most memorable experience from that job was that she once took dictation from Enrico Fermi, though she couldn't recall anything specific about it.

It was in Chicago that she met my dad. They made each other laugh, and in time they married, two funny people in love.

They had four children: my big sister, Kate; me; my little brother Phil; and my even littler brother Sam. My mom was, in many ways, a typical fifties suburban housewife dealing with a houseful of kids. She spent her days—long days—cleaning, cooking a zillion meals, packing school lunches, shopping for groceries, and schlepping us around to Little League games, scout meetings, school functions, parties, etc., in the station wagon, telling us that if we didn't stop punching each other she was going to turn the station wagon around. On the surface, she was a normal mom of the times.

But she was not like the other moms. She had an edge—a sharp, dark sense of humor coiled inside her, always ready to strike.

An example: There was a pond in the Woods behind our house, and we Barry kids spent a lot of time there—ice-skating in the winter, general pond tomfoolery the rest of the year. I have a distinct memory of a summer day when I was maybe seven or eight years old, heading to the pond with my sister, Kate. My mom, who was (as she often was) in the kitchen, shouted out the window to ask us where we were going.

We answered that we were going to the pond, and Mom, in the cheerful voice of a fifties TV-commercial housewife, shouted, "Don't drown, kids!"

"We won't!" we cheerfully shouted back. We thought it was funny. But it's a joke most moms would never have made.

One of her favorite expressions, when something went wrong, was "Oh well, someday we'll all be dead." This always made everyone feel better. Seriously, it did.

Mom would sometimes take us along when she ran errands around Armonk—going to the drugstore, picking up the dry cleaning, buying groceries. The tradesmen of the town were always happy to see her. I remember once we walked into Briccetti's market, where Ray Briccetti was, as usual, behind the meat counter, working the slicer, and when he saw Mom he called out, "Marion!" (They all called her Marion.) "How ya doing?"

Mom answered brightly: "Just shitty, Ray!"

Which Ray loved. She was not like the other shoppers.

If one of us Barry kids was having a problem—say, with a teacher—Mom would declare, "I'm going to put on my bathrobe and pink curlers and drive right down to the school and give that teacher a PIECE OF MY MIND."

Which of course she would never have actually done. But it helped anyway, because it was funny. Even when we were adults, when we had problems, Mom would threaten to solve them by donning her bathrobe and curlers and going to see whoever was causing the problems. And it always helped, at least a little.

My friends loved my mom. When I was in college, my roommate Rob Stavis visited our house during a break, and he told Mom that he'd just been dumped by his girlfriend and he was feeling really depressed. Mom, who loved Rob, listened with a thoughtful, sympathetic expression. When Rob was done, Mom put her hand on his arm and said, "Rob, she was a little snot." And Rob burst out laughing, because he knew deep down inside that she was right.