I have not always had the best relationship with my mother and we rarely agree on many things. However, on Mother’s Day, I wanted to take the time to write about a couple of memories that I have had that of my mother that have shaped my life.
I can recall an occasion when I was young and cannot tell what age I was. My mother and I were at a restaurant, probably a popular drive-in next the railroad tracks which have since been removed. One thing that was unusual about this memory is that I do remember my father being with us and usually if we would eat out it would be with as a family.
As we were getting ready to leave and I noticed that she was counting out money and left it on the table. Maybe I asked her what she was doing but she told me, “You always leave a tip.”
At the time it was 10% (the restaurant had paper plates and disposal tumblers so there wasn’t much to bus not many dishes to wash) and that became a seminal memory in my life. Because of this experience., I know that it is a requirement to tip when eating in a restaurant.
Tipping is seared into my psyche because of this and I get frustrated when I see people online with their cavalier attitude where they think that tipping is optional. In this country it is not.
There maybe three or fewer times in my life when I was in a non-fast food restaurant and did not tip and that was when the service was so terrible that I couldn’t bring myself to it.
When I was in grad school there was a bar on the corner called Bash Riprocks and I would eat there at least weekly. I don’t like tipping on the card so I would usually leave cash on the table after the fact.
One evening there was a new waitress that served me named Sharon Cotter, who was an architecture major at Georgia Tech. I can imagine that the rest of the wait staff informed her that I was a good tipper. When she gave me the check, it came to about $3.47. I paid by credit card and I left no tip on the card. When she picked up the receipt and looked at it, she said, “Thank you for coming” and it sounded like she was fighting back tears because I didn’t give her the tip that she was expected.
But I left and dollar and change on the table when I left.
Another early memory that I have from my mother is when we were driving on Main Street and there was a siren and my mother immediately made a hard right and drove right into the curb and stopped to allow the fire truck or ambulance to pass.
Living where I have lived in my adult life, it was probably decades later before I was ever on the same street with an ambulance or a fire truck. Now, whenever I hear a siren, I always hark back to that memory of my mother pulling over to allow a fire truck to pass.
George Pransky says that babies learn to walk by hanging out with walkers, by watching walkers and by emulating walkers. By spending time with my mother as a young child, I learned to tip and I learned to pull over immediately when there is a siren, This may not sound like much, but who knows? Maybe if I hadn’t actually had those experiences with my mother, I may have had the attitude of “Why do I need to tip? It seems so stupid?” or “There is plenty of room for the fire truck to get around me, It has a whole other lane. Why do I need to pull over?”
When people make comments about white privilege, I say that my white privilege is that I had a mother that taught me by example that I am to tip in restaurants and that I am too pull over immediately when I hear a siren coming my way.
And for that, I will be eternally grateful to my mother.