LOYALTY by Nina Garnham

My mother was every advertiser’s dream because of her unwavering brand loyalty. Here are her brands:

Lucky Strike cigarettes
Tide laundry detergent in powder form
Crest toothpaste
Wonder Bread
Thomas’ English Muffins
Breck Shampoo
Palmolive dish soap
Ajax
Brillo
Mr. Clean
Windex
Maxwell House Coffee
Manishevitz Matzoh’s
Pontiac cars
Minute Maid frozen orange juice
Welch’s Grape Jelly
Skippy Peanut Butter, creamy only
Ritz Crackers

During her lifetime, she only changed a few things. She quit smoking. She stopped buying Wonder Bread. And she started driving Toyotas. Otherwise, her shopping list, a close-knit family, stuck together like lint in the clothes dryer.

My mother demanded complete loyalty according to her strict definitions. When she visited an apartment I had when I was in my early twenties and saw Colgate toothpaste in the bathroom, she took it as a personal affront. “Nina, how could you?” she wondered aloud.

Relatives had to conform to her ideas of loyalty or else she was likely to cut off all communication. Neighbors too. No one could criticize her parents, her brother, or her Uncle Milton. She would enforce these Cold War developments with other family members:

My father was not to see or call his only brother;
We weren’t supposed to call Aunt Florrie or Uncle Joe;
Helen and Zigmunt were out;
We weren’t supposed to go inside Mary Ligouri’s apartment in 2D anymore.

The reasons for these silences were usually unknown to us kids.

I was not immune from the threat of excommunication. “When you were little, you’d go off with anybody,” Mom often lamented, afraid of her 4-year-old’s possible disloyalty so early on. It terrified her.