The Paul Blog

A Mother's Lesson

Joanne L. Szydlowski, July 30, 1932 - December 18, 2002

by Paul Szydlowski

Please excuse my self-indulgence, but I think there’s a nice lesson here.

It begins with a story my mom often tried to tell, but couldn’t because she’d choke up in laughter. It was about the time she swore she saw a UFO around 2 a.m. then decided she had to call the newspaper and break the news. Calling the number in her Rolodex for the Detroit Free Press, she breathlessly told her story, only to be rebuffed by a grumpy voice on the other end.

“Gee, lady, that’s great.” Click. End of conversation.

She couldn’t understand the paper’s utter disinterest until my dad checked the number. “Honey,” he said grinning, “you just woke up the paperboy.”

That was my mom, always finding herself in some sort of Lucy Ricardo-style misadventure. And laughing uncontrollably about it afterward. No matter how bad the situation, she always figured it would make a good story someday. Which was fortunate, because life gave her lots of opportunities for good stories.

As the youngest of five born into a broken home - an absent, alcoholic father and an oft-institutionalized mother - she was shuffled from one Detroit foster home to another during the Great Depression. Along the way, she witnessed the death of a crying infant at the hands of one physically abusive foster mother, was sent packing by a second foster family when, despite her prayers, they chose to adopt another child instead of her and spent one winter making the long, cold walk across the Ambassador Bridge from Canada to Detroit to get to school. This all before she finished second grade.

By age ten, she’d been hired out as a live-in mother’s helper for another family. Her first Christmas there she got up excitedly in the middle of the night to look at the presents under the tree. Discovering that none were for her, she quietly opened and looked at each gift, then carefully rewrapped them and went back to bed. That was her Christmas.

But she never complained. Instead she found the humor. Car troubles, sledding mishaps, ill-advised K-Mart Blue Light Special purchases – all brought on tear-inducing laughter. Ask anyone who knew her and they’ll remember two things – her ready willingness to laugh at herself and her ability to make anyone and everyone feel special.

It was a wonderful gift all too rare in this age of talk show psychotherapy, where every childhood slight is an excuse for adult angst. And it was a gift she readily shared.

We buried my mom two years ago today. Among the hundreds of friends and family at the funeral was one quiet young man no one had seen before. He was keeping to himself at the luncheon following the service. Curious, my dad asked him what had brought him there.

It turned out that mom had spotted him sitting alone at another church function several years earlier. She had come over and spent about an hour chatting and laughing. In that short time, she had made him feel so welcome that when he heard she had died, he just had to pay his last respects.

As my dad related this to us, choking up he said, “That was your mom.”

Yes it was. A simple woman with a simple gift, doing her small part to spread joy and goodwill. And the lesson? Life really is what you choose to make it. Choose well.

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A Father's Lesson

Robert J. Szydlowski, November 15, 1930 - December 7, 2018

When my mom was sick, my dad kept imploring her to get up and keep moving. It was his sweetly desperate attempt to make sure the moving never stopped. But sweet as it may have been, I always wondered how he would respond when it was his turn. Well, let’s just say he walked the walk. Seriously, how many people confined to a wheelchair, too weak to stand – too weak to even lift their legs into the wheelchair footrests – and tied to oxygen tanks would allow, let alone demand, that they be carried downstairs to the Polish Village for lunch, spend five hours at the casino, attend mass and the Usher/Daughter Christmas party, watch the Lions, enjoy a shrimp dinner with his family and entertain his work buddies while Facetiming another in from Florida all AFTER receiving the Last Rites? His last weekend was just this side of Weekend at Bernie’s, with the only exception being that Bernie was calling the shots.

It seems only appropriate that the first person mentioned in my dad’s eulogy was my mom because like Hope and Crosby, Lennon and McCartney or Ricky and Lucy, Bob and Joanne were meant to be together - and not just in a way where the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. It was more than that. They were something special, a perfect, transcendent complement to each other.

I’ve long said that my mom taught us how we could be – finding the humor in everything, teaching us to laugh – especially at ourselves – and to understand that no matter how bad things might get, someday they would make a great story.

Meanwhile, my dad taught us how we should be. Honest, disciplined, generous, faithful, humble. Those lessons often came via his one-line lessons on life, such as the time he gave Pam money to buy school supplies. When she returned, he asked for his change, to which Pam replied, “But dad, it’s only 6 cents.” To which my dad replied, “Yeah, but whose 6 cents is it?” The lesson? If it’s not yours, it’s not yours to decide.

Or the time he stood watching quietly as I subtly improved my lie before chipping up to the green. Only after we’d putted out and were walking off the green did he say, while looking straight ahead, “How will you ever know how good you really are if you don’t play by the rules?” The lesson: It doesn’t matter what you accomplish if you don’t do it the right way.

And sometimes those lessons were passed on in a single word that I think only six of us in this room ever heard him utter: “No.”

But more often than not, those lessons were delivered through his actions – actions that made it seem he was incapable of saying “no.” His 56 years as an usher at St. Kieren’s, quietly served. His selflessness in taking care of his mother and her sisters when all he wanted to do was travel in retirement with my mom. Or arranging for a car for a soldier recovering from war wounds in a Philippine hospital, simply because he could. We all have such stories of his selflessness.

It was the humility inherent in all those acts that was probably my dad’s defining trait. His favorite movie was Rudyard Kipling’s “Gunga Din,” and he would frequently quote the line, “You’re a better man than I, Gunga Din.” Just by chance, my favorite poem is Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” which includes the line

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch

I can think of no better way to describe my dad. He could certainly walk with kings – if he had a problem with his retirement benefits, he didn’t call HR, he called the CEO of GM. When I showed him how Jefferson’s high school stats compared with that year’s top pick in the draft, he promptly sent those stats to Dave Dombrowski, President of the Detroit Tigers. Dave Dombrowski responded, expressing his appreciation for my dad’s love of his grandson and a promise to check Jefferson out – with the Tigers’ head of scouting copied on the reply.

When he retired, he received letters from auto executives and government ministers from around the world, including one from Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Commerce, Malcolm Baldridge, thanking him for his work on behalf of the US auto industry and the American people.

So, yes, he could walk with kings.

But, to me, far more important was his way with crowds, and nowhere could that be better seen than at a Tigers game. Anyone who ever attended a game with my dad knows he was the King of Comerica Park, greeted like a returning hero by everyone from the time he pulled into the parking lot until he got to his seat. My most memorable moment – perhaps the most memorable of all my memorable moments anywhere with dad – took place when he was taking Hannah, Jefferson and me to a game. And I am so, so grateful the kids were there to see this. As we were pulling into the lot, the parking attendant – a rather large, young, black woman – reached into the car to give my dad a hug, while telling us, “I sure do love your daddy!” That wasn’t what I was expecting, so I waited until we pulled away to ask what that was all about.

My dad simply said, “Oh, she just graduated from dental hygiene school and I got her a card and a gift. I just want to support stuff like that.”

To my dad it was no big deal. Just a simple card and gift. But it was so much more. It wasn’t the card or the gift. It was that he had taken the time and interest in a parking lot attendant, a young woman like hundreds and thousands of others we all meet and dismiss every day. But not my dad. To him, she was SOMEBODY.

That is my dad’s lesson and his legacy. King or commoner, CEO or parking lot attendant, we are no better and no worse, no more and no less, than anyone else. We all matter.

So, while Gunga Din might have been thought a better man than Cary Grant or Colonel Weed, or whoever the character was my dad quoted, I can honestly say, in the true spirit of the way you lived your life, Dad, that there was no man better than you.