Mother’s lessons still hit home

The dinners were usually late and staggered. As the oldest of three kids, I was the first in the family to have some kind of sports practice or after- school function that meant my brother and sister had supper, then me, then my mother and father.

It was like that most of the time while we were in school. Only later do you realize how hard that must have been for Mom. There was never a negative word, of course.

She was not particularly interested in sports. She, like so many mothers, worried about this football stuff. One could play baseball and basketball maybe, but football?

My knees have since told me she was right all along.

At some point in my life osmosis took over and it was the things she never asked that gave value to what she did say.

For all those late arrivals home from some practice or game, the question was, “How did it go, did you have a good time?”

Included in the question somewhere was the score, but that wasn’t the question.

She loved to ask about the guys I played with, the guys who from time to time came to the house or she saw on the street. “How’s Frankie and Charlie and Pat and Rod” and so many others.

Those connections made her happy and to this day, those guys remember her with fondness. Those realizations came later in life to me, or was it earlier?

She hated injustice and unkindness. She taught that through her own actions in life. Nobody was less to her. Those down and out were the “poor souls,” words that came from her saturated with caring.

It has been an interesting and sad week for me. A college baseball coach I never met before lost his job in Oklahoma when in the context of a pre-game discussion with him, he used the n-word – a viciously hostile epithet -to distinguish good African Americans from those he deemed less.

He repeated that word and thought process to my broadcast partner. The coach lost his job.

Elie Wiesel, a life long battler against hatred and prejudice wrote:

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.

The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference.

The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference.

And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.

Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.

I have read and believe the words. I have learned what they mean in life from the life of my Mother. The lessons of a life completed so many years ago were not lost.

She was not indifferent.

Now, neither am I.

Happy Mother’s Day.

Old Town native Gary Thorne is an ESPN and ABC sportscaster.