My Mom, & Likely Yours, on Civility

Some lessons never die . . . and maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Here’s to a kinder, gentler New Year

Photo by A A on Unsplash

My mother, Helen Hardy Moreland (1897–1967, may she Rest In Peace) set great store in being Proper. One of my favorite memories is a mental image of her, in the blue hat with a small veil, one white glove on her left hand properly holding the other white glove while she shook hands with someone in a receiving line. Or performed some other gloveless task.

My mother was very much of the White Glove generation. One would not even THINK of appearing at a public event gloveless. What her daughters (I was the youngest of four) would know, though no one else did, was that no two of her white gloves ever matched. Most, well worn, had carefully-darned fingertips, some had frills or decorations — they just never matched. This was because she had neither time nor funds to have matching gloves, so she would just grab any two out of her glove drawer, pull one on and hold the other. 

I was reminded of this emphasis on propriety recently in a discussion of What Really Matters over a holiday dinner. It in turn reminded me of my mother and the Midnight Fire story.

Fresh out of college in the still-proper 1950s, I shared an apartment at 9 East Franklin Street in Richmond VA with my sister Mimi. An easy walk from WRNL Radio where she worked, and The Richmond Times-Dispatch where I had my first major newspaper job, it was also close to the Medical College of VA. Those blocks were full of press types and med students and a good time was frequently had by all.

One night, when Mimi forgot to turn off the sunlamp with which she’d been stylishly tanning her face, it shone unattended into the overstuffed chair until setting a fire that woke us at about midnight. I took off knocking at the doors of other units in the converted antebellum house while Mimi called the fire department. I may or may not have grabbed some slippers; Mimi was calmly taking the curlers out of her hair while she gave them our address.

For the next hour we gathered with friends and neighbors in the middle of downtown Franklin Street, watching the firefighters toss our scorched furniture off the balcony, sipping mugs of brandy-laced coffee thoughtfully passed around by a news photographer who lived across the street. It was, we would later agree, the social event of the season.

But it was also more than a little scary. If Mimi hadn’t sounded the alarm, sensing the smoke before it overcame us, the century-old house would quickly have gone up in flames, taking the inhabitants of six apartments with it. So it was in this spirit of high drama that we re-told the story to our mother the following day (one day before it appeared in the Times-Dispatch.) But oops, while describing the details of her daughters’ brush with death I happened to mention the kind stranger who produced an overcoat as I stood shivering in my nightshirt.

And that detail was the whole story for my mother.

“Oh, dahling,” she said, with genuine remorse. “Any lady would have taken time to get a bathrobe on before leaving the apartment.” 

I don’t miss white gloves, or tanning lamps, but occasionally while listening to the president of the United States (and others) I miss both the customs and the language of civility. A college student once said damn in the presence of my mother, causing him to fall all over himself apologizing for such an unforgiveable breach of etiquette. My mother laughed, assured him that she knew the word — she may have mentioned that Shakespeare used it — and she was not the least offended.

But the lesson was clear: respectfulness never hurts. Whatever Mrs. Trump taught her son when he went off to school, it did not include courtesy, respect or civility.

To be fair, and I do try to be fair most of the time, Donald Trump didn’t invent foul language. Nor are disrespect, incivility and four-letter words limited to any age, social demographic or political party these days. (As far as four-letter words go, they have totally eliminated the former delights of creative cursing, which used to be an entertaining skill for the cursed and the curser alike. That’s another loss.)

No one with a brain would wish for a return to white gloves and tanning lamps. But someone with a soul would know the personal damage caused by coarse, cruel words flung at other human beings. Add to that the societal damage of disrespectful words and uncivil behavior that has become as accepted in today’s public life as propriety was a few generations ago.

Going backwards seldom makes sense unless you’re about to step off a cliff. But we could, in fact, go forward in these troubled times. We could, with a little effort, swear less and tell the truth more. We could think first and swallow hate speech. Talk less and listen more. Bring back civility as a New Year’s gift to the universe.

Our mothers would be proud.