Mom and Pop Operation

My father and mother were children of the Great Depression. They were born and raised in the Appalachian hills of western Pennsylvania at a time when moving from town to town was done most efficiently on foot or by horse, when survival for a family depended on getting a deer before the snows set in. My mother had her first child (not by my father) when she was 15. My father had to put aside his ambitions to become an artist because such talents were not conducive to feeding a large family of siblings and cousins. As a boy I remember my father trying to save an ailing fruit tree by reciting an incantation during the full moon while urinating in a perfect circle. My mother read auras and believed their color indicated good health or impending illness
My father eventually became an analytical chemist, and my mother spiraled ever deeper into schizophrenia. Both hustled and embellished their past in order to survive in a world that demanded they forget their past and tailor their lives to the demands of an ever changing present in the hopes of profiting in an as yet to be determined future. In the end they both achieved what they set out to achieve, which was to eat regularly and keep the poverty wolf away from the door.
The point? I sat in a barber’s chair a few days ago and heard stories of my father’s talent for developing specific products and goods that I know he purchased from a wholesaler as a marketable end product. I also know that my father’s formal education became more extensive with each graduate degree I earned. Pop was the consummate salesman/hustler. He manufactured an authoritative social standing appropriate to making the sale of the moment. His products were always legitimate and of good quality and value. He never, to my knowledge, cheated anyone and always stood 100% behind whatever he sold. What he had learned as he moved from his Appalachian, backwoods upbringing was that people are driven to action by perception not actuality. People must believe before they act.
My mother was the perfect believer. She constructed a world that differed from my father’s only in the intended audience. My father’s audience was those around him while my mother’s audience was herself. He built himself in order to survive in the world. She built the world she could survive within.
We all have strategies for coping with the everyday challenges of the world. In every circumstance, we must move those around us to believe in the truth of our existence. Without that belief, we drown.