Attic Salt for May 11, 2008

• By ED CULLEN
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: May 11, 2008 - Page: 1D - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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I get e-mails from an outfit that promotes flying lessons. Birthday. Christmas. Father’s Day. Give someone — give YOURSELF — the gift of flying.

The one I just got begins, “Mother’s Day is just around the corner … ”

The suggestion that I give my mother the gift of flying made me realize how unimaginative I was with Mother’s Day gifts of perfume, flowers, chocolate. What if my mother wanted to fly but was never given the chance?

There are women who would welcome such a gift. My mother wasn’t one of those women. The thought of my mother at the controls of an airplane brings back two of my most vivid childhood memories.

My mother might have been a natural-born flyer, but cars confounded her. She took my sister and me to school one day in my Uncle Bill’s car.

He was visiting. We were late for school. It was raining.

“Sure, Mildred, take my car,” my uncle said.

This uncle knew that my mother’s passion for driving was exceeded only by her lack of ability.

He knew the story of my mother’s borrowing their father’s Model A for a drive around the block when she could barely see over the steering wheel.

My aunts and uncles were on the porch with my grandparents when my mother came around the corner on two wheels.

They were exaggerating I’m sure but that’s how the story went. “Mil came around the corner on two wheels and Papa spewed coffee.”

My mother stopped growing between 5 feet 1 inch and 5-2. She never stopped barely seeing over steering wheels. The day she drove us to school in a car with standard transmission, she managed to kill the engine a dozen times in a series of spine-snapping leaps.

My sister and I hugged the floorboards to lower our centers of gravity and to make it appear that the tiny woman grinding gears and popping the clutch was driving solo.