The Indoorsman -- Mom's a (balsamic) peach

So, last summer I'm on vacation with my family on the Lake Michigan coast, and it's my mom's night to cook.

I don't remember what she makes as an entree. None of us does. But, in a move that has since become part of family lore, she decides to try balsamic peaches as a side dish. That is to say, she loads up some peaches with balsamic vinegar and throws them on the grill. Dad raises an eyebrow, but Mom insists she's read about this somewhere. It's an interesting idea, you know, mixing savory and sweet and all that. It sounds like these peaches might be delicious.

They are not.

There is unanimous agreement on this point.

Nevertheless, I tell my mom they're pretty good. And she says she likes them, too. I suspect she's lying, and I suspect she suspects I'm lying. But there's tacit agreement to sort of pretend that these peaches aren't awful, because that's just sort of the nice thing to do. My siblings and their spouses, probably because they live closer and see her more often, feel no such obligation and pretty much straight give her the business about those awful, awful peaches.

Mom is cool, though; she can take it. This is a woman who grew up with five brothers and sisters. So she's got a sense of humor and a salty vocabulary, and taking a little ribbing about peaches isn't going to get her too upset.

Aside from all that, she's tough. Like, in the you-do-not-want-to-mess-with-her sense. My folks are happily married and have been for 30 years, but there was about a two-year period when my dad got a new job and had to leave us behind until the house sold. Mom raised the four of us virtually on her own for those two years. That'll toughen up anyone.

Thankfully, we didn't bear the brunt of it too often. Instead, she took out her bad days on telemarketers. It was vicious. If the phone rang during dinner, I would always secretly hope it was a telemarketer; it was such terrifying fun to watch Mom's face change from a hopeful phone-answering smile to a stone mask of white-hot hatred. There would be yelling and slamming of phones.

I kind of felt sorry for those telemarketers. But I didn't feel sorry when my mom went after my freshman biology teacher. He was one of those creepy types who put the best-looking girls in the front row and then stared at them. He and I had problems, and I'm quite certain he gave me a D on a test I had aced, just out of spite. When I asked to see the graded test, he told me he'd lost it. Not all of them, just mine. Mom called him up, he gave her the same line. Being a schoolteacher herself, she found it kind of fishy. So she came down to talk to him face to face. I got to retake the test and I was switched to a different teacher halfway through the year (much to this guy's relief, I'm sure).

I was thinking about that -- and all the other times she stood up for me or my siblings -- when I called her Sunday for Mother's Day. And I thought about those peaches, too. They weren't so bad.

* Pat Muir is the lead writer at On magazine and a staff writer for the Yakima Herald-Republic. He has found that writing columns about family members is less expensive than buying them gifts.