Monday, May 11, 1998

The Lengths Mom Went To
by Wunnies (TMF Conan's Mom)

So you were wondering how we put TMF Conan, demi-lord of the Tech Dome at Fool HQ, through the University of Wisconsin at Madison ( the nation's # 2 party school!)?

Here, Foolish readers, is a story with a moral. It begins with the truth and then veers into fantasy. But it all leads toward the overwhelming conclusion, which is to say, The Moral.

We lived cheap: buy the lowest-priced, use it up, wear it out, make it do -- that was the motto of the Keeler family as we struggled to come up with the $65K it would take for our baby to live it up for four years in cheese land.

Though we hoped for scholarships (ha ha!) and we rejected loans (hey, we're proud!) it was all up to us -- although it turned out that the little dickens was able to bamboozle about $6,000 out of the university "working" in the Student Union game room.

What were the traits that we as parents found to be most critical in supporting our budding genius? Well, being lazy, sloppy, and paranoid helped. We couldn't seem to be bothered getting the usual middle-class stuff for our house; we simply used the old grad school days' Korell dishes and cafeteria cutlery, and most of the furniture was second-hand.

Since the cheap little home we got on some kind of government loan didn't have any closets, we saved a lot on towels, blankets and extra hot-wheel tracks. We didn't get our "fixer-upper" fixed up because we didn't know how, and we were afraid of workmen (do you feed them? will they like us?). I cut the kids' hair, and my husband cut his own, even though it made him look like he should be standing with his finger in the dike.

Soon I started canning cherries off our tree, and learning to live on bugs, bark, and sassafrass roots. We studied customs of the early settlers and discovered that we could survive without plumbing, and then, tipping our hat to the French, we began to bathe in the local pond just once a week. This had the added benefit of driving away our friends and neighbors, so we no longer ran up those nasty de rigueur cocktail party bills.

Not long after that, we began to go out to the wheat fields that are so common here in Montana and, in a paroxysm of biblical resolve, we began to gather leftover wheat which we would grind and bake into unleavened bread. Meanwhile, of course, Baby Max was tossing back boilermarkers (shots of bourbon followed with beer chasers, I should explain for the uninitiated/unintoxicated). We were awfully proud when we received those handy little photos of our boy's somber face: we enjoyed both the frontal view and the profile, but we wondered about those little numbers at the top, and we couldn't understand why the photos were forwarded from the police station instead of the registrar's office.

Of course, I sewed all of our clothing; but we really started saving money when we began to pick up road-kill deer carcasses, because if we chewed on them long enough, we could make leather, and from the leather we made our own coats, boots and studded wrist bracelets.

So what's the moral of all this? Necessity is the mother of invention? Blood is thicker than water? Whatever the mind of man can imagine, it can create?

No!

The moral is contained in the truth.

After all that scrimping and saving...

...we got the money for Max's college from his grandmother.

The moral is: be kind to your Mom.

--Wunnies (aka Max's Mom)

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