Things worth more than money

By Bill Fields

On Mother’s Day, I think of a working mom: mine.

Growing up in a time when more mothers than not stayed at home, Mom always had a job. Although she has worked in a department store and a small dress shop in her later years, when it comes to life outside the home, she is a bank teller in my mind’s eye.

No matter what it houses, I will never think of the building set back from Broad Street as anything but Citizens Bank and Trust, Southern Pines’ first and, until the early 1960s, only bank. It became part of First Union in the early 1970s and went through other mergers and acquisitions along the way and is part of Wells Fargo today.

Mom’s years at the bank spanned from the 1950s in the Broad Street location into the 1980s at the branch in Pinecrest Plaza. Although I can’t say having a bank teller for a mom was as exciting as if she had been a zookeeper, basketball coach or pilot, there were advantages.

I might not have gotten larger denominations than other kids from the Tooth Fairy, but I bet nobody found more shiny quarters under his or her pillow. When I began a coin collection, it was easy, with Mom’s help, to get started on filling the slots in those blue folding books — Buffalo nickels, Mercury dimes, even the occasional aluminum penny from World War II would show up.

I got to tour the place, of course, beyond the teller windows. The break room was nifty, but getting to step in the vault was better than a school field trip out of town. When I was real little, I asked her why we couldn’t take all the money and move to Mexico. But life on the lam, even in a warm, sunny place by the water, wasn’t in her dreams. I did, however, get a gross of No. 2 pencils once that she bought at wholesale from the office supply salesman. I also got one winter of Tuesday nights at the bowling alley when she was part of the Citizens Bank team, and her white shirt with green lettering was the best sporting attire I’d seen that wasn’t in Carolina Blue and white.

Mom went to work whether she felt good or felt bad. Pretending a sniffle was something more in order to get a day off was considered on the order of burglarizing a neighbor’s home — something you would never even think about. Sometimes she came home on her lunch break to watch a bit of As the World Turns, but she always returned to the bank at the appointed time, even if some good stuff was going on in Oakdale.

And when the workday was over, she did not have the luxury of being able to pick up a roasted chicken at Harris Teeter or takeout from dozens of restaurants. Dad occasionally cooked supper, but it was mostly Mom’s responsibility. We had a home-cooked hot meal — tasty, filling — for supper almost every night.

Mom did these things — one job for which she was paid and another for which she wasn’t — without fanfare or complaint, that being the way things were and the way she was. If, over my working life, I have met deadlines and for the most part not had colleagues who wanted to throw things at me in frustration, I owe a lot of that to her example.

She never failed to be courteous to customers, whether they were insurance agents, shop clerks, doctors or factory workers who endorsed their paycheck with an “X” instead of a signature because they didn’t know how to write. There was a dignity in her job and in everyone she waited on.

I’ve been to plenty of banks from Georgia to Connecticut since my middle school days when my mother made me put most of the money from a brief summer job into a new savings account instead of blowing it on something I didn’t really need. Some of these tellers have been nice and helpful, perfectly fine folks, but I am a very tough grader.  PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

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