Mayday, mayday. This is your mother.


A week or two before I visited Portland, I was walking down 16th Street in the Mission aproaching South Van Ness. The sidewalk is so uneven and warped it looks like it's melting. People are camped out on corners. Thin women in high heels whore themselves from block to block. A drunk mexican guy is chasing a homeless man who pushes a shopping cart. There's human feces piled in a doorway.

Then my cell phone rings. It's my mom. Her sweet, loving, nurturing voice with all the crap playing out before me was a remarkable contrast. I walk down the street listening to her call me "sport". She talks about her church banners and updates me on my little nephews and I pass by a woman who has just picked a giant scab off her cheek.



A few years ago I watched a program about Air Force technology. It described all the doohickeys and thingamajigs on the heads-up displays. They also talked about the intense centrifugal force trainers, mid air blackouts, and the voice systems they use on board the fighter jets for these types of emergencies. The voice they chose sounded like some kind of angelic, young, beautiful woman -- almost exactly like Arwen, the Elf Lord's daughter in Lord of the Rings.

So our hero pilot blacks out in mid flight and this dreamy voice comes on in the cockpit. It says something like, "Lieutenent Frodo...pull up Frodo...pull up."

All hell is breaking loose. The wings are tearing apart as the ocean is getting ready to splash through the windshield.

Not one alarm goes off. Just sweet, smooth, gentle, "Wake up my dear hobbit."

Research proved that the pilots woke up more during blackouts and pulled themselves out of dire situations when there was a nurturing, motherly voice guiding them along.



God, I love my mother's voice.