A Civil Tongue

Mom's response to an argumentative child or a growling dog was, "Keep a civil tongue in your head."  Proper and civil language usage was of paramount importance to her. She would tolerate my career choice of, say, streetwalker, more easily than my desecration of the English language (that's not to say she'd be happy about the career choice, of course).

When I left home at 17 and moved to Great Britain, I sent long letters (written in the combination of English and French that I favored at the time) home describing my new life there.  Mom saved them all and gave them back to me 20 years later with the instruction to turn them into a book.  I dug into the box of letters eagerly, hoping for a glimpse of a younger, more idealistic Jean, and discovered that Mom had corrected my spelling and grammar with her English teacher's red pen.  I would have been offended by that at 17, but at 37, I had to laugh.

At other times, though, Mom's own civil but razor sharp tongue made me wince.  While she was teaching a good-natured friend of mine to sew, I cringed to hear her say, "Don't ask stupid questions.  I only want to hear intelligent ones."

Decades later, I too often open my mouth and hear my mother’s voice come out of it, shooting words like arrows straight to the heart of the target.