The Mommy Network

Remember, when we were kids, it was generally believed that the government or somebody had a complete record on everybody? In some communities it was called "The Permanent Record" but, in our neighborhood, people just called it "The Record". If a kid did something wrong, or just dumb, people would say, "Once you get something like that on your record, it will follow you all your life and you will never live it down." It was quite late in life before I found out that The Record was just a myth. Lots of people have records on you, but there is no one Record with a capital "R". At least that's what this lady told me, and she was a college graduate, so she ought to know. Silly me! All my life I had been very careful to tell the truth whenever I filled out any kind of form. I figured that they already knew everything about me, so the only reason they had me filling out this form was to see if I was honest, so I always was. The fact still remains that everybody knew everything about me when I was a kid, and now I think I know why.

My mother used to go to a place they called "the beauty shop" a couple blocks from our house. Guys never went in there, but I seem to remember being in there when I was really young. I used to quietly color in a book or play with some toy while my mother got this treatment, which was called a "permanent". I remember that the place smelled like some kind of chemical, and that all the mommies sat in a row of chairs with metal helmets on their heads and read magazines. There was no point in talking to any of them because they couldn't hear me for the noise that seemed to be generated by those helmets, so I just played by myself.

Later, when I didn't go there anymore, my mother would often come home from the beauty shop and tell me something that she had heard from one of the other mothers. Sometimes it was about me, and I assumed that this other mother had looked it up on my record. How else could she have known about it? Come to think of it, how could my mother have heard it from one of the other mothers when none of them could have heard anything with those helmets on? Well, after all these years, I think I know the answer. It's only a theory, but so is most of what passes for science nowadays.

I think that those metal helmets were some kind of high tech device that linked all the mommies together in what I will call "The Mommy Network". There were beauty shops like that one all over the world, or at least all over Chicago and, when a mommy put on a helmet, her mind was linked with the minds of all the other mommies who happened to be hooked up wherever they were. The fact that they were reading magazines tells me that they were communicating on some subliminal level and weren't consciously aware of the information that was being downloaded into their minds, but they obviously could consciously call it up later. That's why mothers in those days knew everything about their own kids and everybody else's kids as well.

I asked my hypothetical wife if they still had beauty shops, and she said that they call them "hair salons" nowadays, and men go in there as well as women. I didn't know that before because my hypothetical wife has been helping me cut my hair at home for as long as I can remember. The last time I had my hair cut by a professional, it was in a barber shop. In those days, women went to beauty shops and men went to barber shops, and that's the way it was. My hypothetical wife, however, refuses to let me cut her hair and goes to this hair salon instead. She also told me that they still have a few of those metal helmets in her hair salon, but they are stashed up against the wall and seldom used. This could explain why kids get away with so much stuff nowadays and their parents don't seem to know about it, The Mommy Network is no longer operational.