The Duck Lady: In Memory of My Mother

My mom—born Ina Ethel Miller some 92 years ago in Cleveland—had a mean streak. Now that’s not entirely how I want you to remember her. She could be incredibly compassionate and nurturing as well. More on that in a bit. But if someone forced me to name a single attribute that captured the spirit of Ina Singer (the name she took on after marrying my father), I’d begin with her toughness.

This harder edge likely owes to her hardscrabble upbringing in East Cleveland in the Depression-era 1930s. Her weekly allowance as a child was ten cents; she spent half on a Saturday matinee and the rest on candy at the theater. She could not call friends from home because the phone company imposed a surcharge for more than three local calls per day.

She attended Rozelle Elementary. She was the smallest child in her class. One day at school a classmate made the mistake of calling her a “Jew.” In retaliation, she took off her roller skates and clocked the offender across the head. Vengeance was a virtue. If you spent an hour with her, you would hear the roller skating story. Maybe twice.

Upon graduating from Shaw High School, she married my father at the tender age of 18. He was back from having served in Japan, held a good-paying sales job, and moved her into the tonier neighborhood of Cleveland Heights in the 1950s. She gave birth to my sister and brother in 1955 and 1956, respectively. Neither one of my parents would attend college.

Another one of her favorite stories (aka lessons) involved putting a curse on a neighbor on Bendemeer Road in the late 1960s. The neighbor, who went by the name “Red,” was nasty to her kids. Red took great pride in his lawn, and even practiced putting on it. One glorious day, the story goes, Red yelled at my brother for accidentally stepping on Red’s tremendous turf. Red went into his home and before you could even blink, the ambulance arrived to carry him away in a stretcher. Red died of a heart attack. But my mom was convinced that it was her magical powers that did it. And she was very proud of ending him.

My mom was my protector, which required a tough exoskeleton. If someone mistreated me, even in the slightest, her reaction was to go to the mattresses. A teacher docked me for being late? Let’s call the principal! A coach benched me? Let’s call the commissioner of the league!

This is why I would never discuss my work with her, as her expectation would be that my client wins every time. The hypothetical conversation would go something like this …

Mom: So tell me about that loss in Jimmy John’s. What went wrong?

Me: I’d prefer to talk about my monopsony cases with a happier ending, like UFC, Chicken Growers, or Arizona Travel Nurses.

Mom: Did the judge not like you in Jimmy John’s? Would you like me to call him?

Me: It’s a she. And no, you cannot call her.

She was a master of employing guilt to arrive at her desired outcome. I’d bring home a report card with a long run of A’s and one B plus. The dinner conversation began, middled, and ended on the single demerit. This was good preparation for my future depositions! How did you allow this B+ to happen? In her mind, B+ was tantamount to failing and would bring great shame to the fine Singer academic tradition! Did you not enjoy the class? Can I call the teacher? I remember feeling the food coming back up my throat as she interrogated me. Although she never took an economics class, she understood incentives well.

My mom smacked me once across the face—thankfully without roller skates—for throwing a temper tantrum around the age of 13. I deserved it. (Before the smacking, she claimed she had returned a pair of pants I was planning to wear to a school dance, and I overreacted.) Given my spoiled nature and my proclivity to get in trouble, I think one smack in 18 years of smacking opportunities showed incredible restraint on her behalf.

My family had spent down their nest egg in the 1960s and so dad took a job with a relative in Dallas to build it back. My brother dropped out of a public high school in Fort Worth in the mid-1970s. You can imagine this development did not sit well with my mom, the disciplinarian. My dad took the opposite tact, encouraging my brother to find himself and pursue his passion for music. This disparate parenting philosophy led to several intense family conflicts, with my dad tossing a Chinese dinner on the ceiling one night in protest over my mom’s punishment strategy. (C’mon, don’t act like this never happened in your family!)

When my brother learned of my mom’s passing, he wrote me and my sister a note describing mom as a “toughy.” But enough about her gangster side. Let’s talk about the tender side.

My mom was a caregiver. She knew how to make you feel important. Anyone who visited the Singer household got the royal treatment. And, just like that Jewish mother stereotype, her compassion often took the form of (force) feeding you. (She never drank and if you wanted a stiff one in the Singer household, you were out of luck.) Her parents, Hyman and Pauline, were from Russia and Poland, which influenced her cooking. Her main course would feature stuffed peppers (with a meat stuffing topped with a tomato sauce), beef brisket, or chopped liver. But dessert was her speciality—mandelbroit (recipe here), noodle kugel (recipe here), or rugelach were on permanent display.

I was my mom’s fortieth birthday present. Because of her age and her mid-life girth—she lost her girlish figure in her 30s—she didn’t realize I was kicking around inside of her until late in the pregnancy. Every time she told this story, the weeks into the pregnancy upon which she learned she was pregnant increased. In the 1990s, she was ten weeks pregnant when she learned; in the aughts, she was 20 weeks pregnant when she learned. Had she lived much longer, she wouldn’t have known of her pregnancy until well after giving birth!

She never held a job outside of the home for most of my upbringing. This changed when I reached high school, as she began making costumes for the theater troupe, including the famous Tevye costume. (No need to dig here, as the VHS video tapes are locked in a sealed vault and I’ve misplaced the key.) She continued to design costumes for the school well after I graduated. Her costumers were so elegant that one drama coach absconded with them as he left for another school!

I’m pretty sure she wanted me to be a lawyer, as she never met an economist (or even understood what they do). So I applied to both law schools and economics departments. When I announced I was choosing economics—and that I didn’t have to pay for my degree—she made this odd guttural sound in the back of her throat: Grrrrrrrrrrrr. I had never heard that sound before, but I presumed she was proud of me.

My mom knew how to work the press. In 1999, when I was starting my career in Washington, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram profiled her in the Life & Arts section for fostering a flock of ducks in the pond adjacent to her apartment complex. Maybe I learned something here.

One paragraph in her profile still makes me laugh:

So after two years, when Singer’s flock had grown to just ten ducks, she decided to undertake a little mothering of her own. The moment the ducklings hatched, she removed them from their mothers, tucked them into a small cage she constructed of chicken wire, where Singer could keep a wary eye, and plied the youngsters with chick starter food with an occasional dollop of tuna. She hauled the youngsters along to card games, leaving nothing to chance.

Without children to ply with food, she turned to the ducks. She was a nurturer. With an occasional dollop of tuna.

She was also a natural leader, serving as the president of Jewish Women International, Fort Worth chapter, for over a decade. This was mostly a social (as opposed to political) organization. But the fact that her peers elected her repeatedly to represent them speaks to her ability to command a room (and host a wicked party).

My mom was an accomplished Mahjong player. She was part of club (of mostly Jewish women) in Fort Worth who played the Chinese tile game five-odd days a week, for multiple hours a sitting. Her club was so good that they traveled to Las Vegas to compete in national tournaments. (Quick aside: I blame the Mahjong games for everyone struggling with weight in my family. She would prepare pastries for the games that remained on display well after the games ended.)

In addition to nurturing three children, she cared for her pets (aside from her ducks) continuously. She began with cats, named Susie, Mike Ike, and Snowball. And when she turned to dogs, she raised Candy, Frisky, and Marty Finkelstein with compassion. There was a brief stretch in the mid-1970s when we had ducks and a dog (Candy) in the backyard. It was chaos. And it was magical.

Ina Singer leaves behind one daughter (Madelyn) and two sons (David and me), a daughter-in-law (Ingrid), as well as a prince of a son-in-law (Jeff) who took a job at her assisted living facility so he could look after her. It will be left to her grandkids (Billy, Bobby, Alexis, Kayla, and Jake) and great grandkids (Cooper and Maddie) to tell her gangster stories to the next generation.

She is buried next to her beloved husband and my father, Mike Singer, in Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell, Florida. And she will be missed tremendously.

P.S. For the last decade or so, I used to announce on Twitter that I was “Calling Mom” after being quoted in the media, typically in an obscure outlet with which she would not be familiar. I’m retiring that schtick for now. So just know that whenever something good happens, I’ll be calling her up in my memories.

Automatic Baseball: In Memory of My Father

Myer (“Mike”) Singer, 95th Light Tank Company, Chigasaki, Japan 1946

 

“Don’t ever look up to anyone. And don’t ever look down on anyone.”

“He gets up in the morning just like you. He ties his shoes one foot at time, just like you.”

These are lines my dad repeated during my youth, pounding home the themes of equality and opportunity. He wasn’t political. To this day, I don’t know how (or whether) he voted. He didn’t resent wealth or covet anyone’s possessions. It was merely his pep talk. He was my coach. In baseball and in life.

Perhaps he was worried that I developed an inferiority complex. My parents sent me to a private school that catered to the wealthy families of Fort Worth, and we didn’t exactly fit in. My dad owned a scrap metal business, Singer Metals, in a rough part of town. His company scraped out the metals from dilapidated computers and other junked electronic devices, and sold the metals on the secondary market. The business was dirty in every sense, and he didn’t want me to get anywhere near it. We lived in a modest house in the southwest (i.e., lower-income) part of the city, and when his business needed an injection of cash, he sold the house, and we moved into an apartment complex near my school.

*   *   *

Myer (“Mike”) Singer was born in Cleveland in 1928, as the nation was heading into an economic collapse. His father was a bootlegger—which for the longest time brought me great shame until I learned of other families who participated in the underground economy—and his mother took care of the home. In his youth, my dad and his siblings served as decoys on the family’s whiskey deliveries, sitting atop of the barrels on the truck. During one pending raid at his home, at his father’s instructions, my dad poured the sweet sauce out the second-story window.

My dad didn’t care much for academics, and spent most of his youth playing tennis on public courts. Upon graduating high school, he left for Japan to serve in the occupation army after World War II. Given his tennis acumen, he easily made the army’s travel team, and he played against Japanese opponents in tournaments across Japan, making his way to the quarter finals (an accomplishment he mentioned often). If you wanted to make peace with a former enemy, you would send my dad.

Upon returning from Japan, he married my mother (then Ina Miller) in Cleveland and started a family. He was a traveling salesman with no real skills other than his charm. He boasted about his marketing skills, claiming that he could “sell snow to the Eskimos.” Apparently he could: He semi retired in his late thirties, taking the family to Miami for extended vacations. When the money ran out, he followed an uncle down to Dallas, where he was introduced to the seedier side of the scrap metal business.

Scrap metal in the 1970s was dominated by “tough Jews,” and his unscrupulous uncle fit the profile. Deliveries of metals from the Dallas site were often deliveries of dirt, with a veneer of metals to throw off the unsuspecting customers, who upon learning of the fraud couldn’t exactly complain. Because he was not a tough Jew, my dad broke away from his uncle’s shop and started his own in Fort Worth, moving my mom, sister and brother down from Cleveland. The family would expand by one in 1972.

In the days before social media, my dad was a social animal. He belonged to the local conservative synagogue and the local JCC. (He was raised in an orthodox home. I remember visiting his parents in Cleveland. We couldn’t operate electronics during the Sabbath, so we walked to the synagogue, where I watched the services alongside my mother from a second-story balcony, as women were not allowed to participate.) He had a breakfast club at the local CoCo’s (which became JoJo’s), and the breakfast club turned into a pool club in the late mornings. I watched him play pool for hours on the weekends—he mastered the game, leaving his opponents with impossible shots on the rare occasions he missed his own—and when his friends left our home, he would play me. He also had a poker club, which met once a week for decades.

My dad was my baseball coach during my formative years. Due in part to his laziness—he was badly overweight in his fifties—but also due to his keen understanding of incentives, he pioneered the technique of Automatic Baseball. Under this system, if a player made an error in the field, the player would automatically take himself out of the game. If a pitcher (and that was often me) surrendered two runs, the pitcher would come off the field. This set of rules took all decision-making out of the hands of the coach. Although it sounds harsh, it was the opposite: He loved his players, they loved him, and we played with focus. He never yelled. Before one game, he placed a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket and told me to earn it. He drove his white Pontiac Firebird to the game and chewed his cigars from the dugout.

In high school, he attended all of my home games, and many of my road games. Sometimes we traveled great distances from Fort Worth to find other prep schools comprised of affluent white kids. At home baseball games, he would sit near tennis legend Martina Navratilova, who became the second mom of one of my teammates (way before that became a thing). He witnessed my one and only touchdown in Dallas. He never missed a play or musical performance, and embarrassingly I dabbled there. One such play was at a community theater; the show ran for two weeks straight, and he, along with my mom, didn’t miss a single performance. (Don’t even bother trying to get the tapes. They are in a sealed vault.) He traveled to Tulane to see my final performance. (Also sealed.)

My dad and I watched hundreds of Texas Rangers games together, some in person but mostly in our apartment. Watching a game with my dad was a magical experience. And not just for me. My friends would ask if they could come over to watch the games with him. He would lay on the couch, belly slightly exposed, and wax eloquently about life and baseball. There was something cathartic about being in his presence. And it was something they couldn’t get in their own homes.

The action in baseball is sufficiently episodic that it permits conversation. When my friends were not around, my dad and I would debate several things, but a recurring sore spot was my career path. He was disappointed that I planned to give up acting to become an economist, which would take nine years of school. Education wasn’t a priority: “Bring me home some damn B’s so I know that you’re normal!” Our fights in the living room would go something like this.

Me: You don’t understand that the vast majority of actors are starving. We only hear about the success stories. The mean income of an actor is below the poverty line!

Him: You are not the mean! You are a star!

Me: I am a star among a couple of hundred kid actors in Forth Worth. That’s not going to translate to success in New York.

Him: You will be a star no matter where you go!

And so it went. He never moved off of his position, and I would reject his career advice to become a lame (in his eyes) economist. Looking back at the debate, I’m not so sure he cared about which path I took. He just wanted to drive home the idea that I was special. That was his job. He was my coach. (There is also a little performance in what I do. So hopefully he would be proud.)

My dad had a triple bypass when I was at college in the early 1990s. He quit the cigars, but he refused to modify his diet or to exercise. He retired in his sixties and remained in the same apartment until he could no longer navigate the stairs leading to the front door. He moved to a retirement home in Fort Worth, and then to a nursing home in Clearwater. My sister and her family visited him weekly, and my brother and I would fly in as much as we could.

My dad lost the ability to speak in his final years. Yet he could still sing, and he remembered the lyrics of several songs. So we would sing together in his room. “I Like New York in June” and “Mister Five” were his favorites. We often sat together in silence.

My dad was slightly embarrassing to take to nice restaurants. He would order his steaks well-done with a side of ketchup. He would send back soups that were not served at sweltering temperatures. He would often say, “I want to go to the places where the stools are high and the prices are low.” I’m not sure they charge prices where he is going. But he is sitting atop the highest stool.

My dad passed away on Monday. He was 91 years old. He leaves behind his wife (Ina), three children (Madelyn, David and me), five grandchildren (Billy, Bobby, Alexis, Kayla, and Jake), and two great-grandchildren (Maddy and Cooper). He will rest in Florida National Cemetery, near the city of Bushnell. And he will be missed dearly.