A small story:

For various reasons, my mother had precious few pictures of her family. There are only two pictures of my maternal grandfather, both from his wedding to my grandmother. The expression in both is best described as "Resigned to a slow death by freezing."

The first time I saw these pictures, as a child, I noted that this didn't exactly strike me as the usual wedding expression, certainly not when the wedding photographer had given you plenty of time to compose your face otherwise.

"My father," she said, "Had a full scholarship to the University of Minnesota."

Since we had already established her parents were 19 when they got married, I assumed "Marriage" and "Scholarship" were mutually exclusive. Ah, he gave up education for love! Then, why the misery?

"I was born seven months later."

My grandmother wore a large wedding bouquet at her waist and the small smile of a girl who locked down the best-looking and smartest boy in her senior class of eleven. As good Catholics, they then made each other miserable until death.

My mother, their only child, got her father's brains and her mother's will; from childhood, she knew her goal was to get herself out of Northern Minnesota the minute she could, skipping grades to hasten the process. Like her father, she got a scholarship to college.

In my mother's senior year of high school her mother - a heavy smoker and an enthusiastic drinker - had a stroke, requiring full-time care.

Like her father, my mother before her was trapped in a small, smallminded town.

My mother stayed two years.

After this, my grandmother was well enough that my mother said, "I'm eighteen, here's your spoon and I'm out. Sorry, Dad." She then ran to that metropolitan pinnacle, that Paris of the Midwest...Minneapolis, where she worked and sent home money to support them.

Baby steps.

She eventually became a bookkeeper and not long after that, she started specializing in certain business sectors:

1. Nightclubs,
2. Construction,
3. The recording industry.

Or, as you might know it, The Mob.

"Minneapolis mobsters were Jewish," my Mother would say, "I was tall, blonde and blue-eyed. I looked like all of their mistresses and they didn't have to buy me a mink stole."

"Quinn, were you ever, EVER going to be normal?"

Probably not.

Anyway, my mother lived in a large Victorian house broken up into apartments, like the apartments in THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW if the show had been written by Raymond Carver. In the apartment next to hers was a very pretty young woman who had a twisted leg.

Their apartments were on the third floor, accessible only by stairs. The girl could climb the stairs, but it took great effort so my mother got in the habit of grabbing the girl's mail, asking if she needed anything if my mother was going to the store.

You know; humanity.

They shared a landing, so they knew each other's business. My mother knew that twice a week, two hours each time, the girl would have a visitor, a much-older man in an expensive suit and a wedding ring. One night after the visit, there was a knock on my mother's door.

The expensive suit was standing there.

"You've been very nice to my friend," he said to my mother, "I'd like to thank you. You're a bookkeeper for nightclubs."

My mother nodded, trying to remember if she'd ever told the neighbor that.

"Minnesota winters are cold."

My mother nodded again.

"Would you like to be a bookkeeper someplace warm? How about Miami? Cuba? You want Las Vegas? You'll make good money, we'll set you up."

My mother stood in the dingy doorway of her dark apartment in her freezing city and she thought about it.

She politely turned him down.

For most of my life, the fact that she didn't take the offer never failed to confuse me for at least three reasons I could come up with off the top of my head:

1. Her affinity for heat; like a housecat, she instinctively gravitated towards warm and sunny patches.
2. They were offering more money and she was supporting her folks.
3. She had a lifelong love for the demi-monde. "I went to Miami to work for the Mob" was squarely on brand.

I was walking today and listening to a podcast about the Mob and someone with an almost implausibly Chicago accent was explaining his life's work which could be summed up as, "Someone told me to kill a person, so I killed that person," and I suddenly knew why she'd said no.

In Minneapolis, my mother was just working for the Mob. If she was moved by them, set up in a nice apartment, she was Mob. My mother had already slithered out of a situation which had tried to define the rest of her life; she wasn't running headlong into another one.

I'm thinking a lot lately about the lessons I have been taught, and the lessons I have just gleaned and yes, it would have been heaven if someone has whispered into my childhood shell-like ear, "This is how you make a fuckton of money."

But the lesson I got, and the lesson I prize is, "You don't let anyone tell you who you are. And always help the sweet girl with the bum leg."

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