I found out years later she cried the morning I left home for college. Typically, she got her tears out of the way before I even got up that morning so as not to cast over a pall about which I was so excited.
Again, typically, she wrote a poem about the day. She did that at most momentous events in her life. Of all she did in her life in the name of a paycheck, she never did for money that for which she probably had the greatest talent: writing.
She would not have been a novelist but a poet or a writer in the vein of Erma Bombeck, one of the country’s greatest female humorists who became nationally recognized for her syndicated column. Bombeck also wrote some 15 books, most of which were best sellers. She died long ago, way back in 1996.
This writer who cried for me eschewed the telephone and never had a fax around anywhere. Instead, she sat down and wrote letters, the old-fashioned kind with salutations and envelopes and stamps. Of course, nobody does that anymore. I feel sorry for what they’re missing. Computers are cold, heartless. Letters painstakingly written by hand are warm, loving, and eminently special.
I called; she wrote. I got the better end of the deal. Finding a letter from her amid the bills and the catalogs was like finding buried treasure. Her letters were jewels, for likely as not, each epistle was a series of anecdotes, a wry commentary on life’s foibles and misadventures.
Her greatest work, however, was not written. She lived it. Her life was a Homerian epic with its share of Bob Dylan’s cruel twists of fate.
She could have been raised the pampered scion of a plantation owner, but the bottom fell out of the turpentine market and her parents had to move and scratch and claw to make a living. Her father was the dashing type, coming home each day from riding his horse on his rounds on the plantation. More often than not, he had rattlesnake fangs in his boots.
She could have had an idyllic wedding ceremony with honeymoon, which she really did. But my father was married in his uniform, and 10 days after the ceremony, he was gone. She was not to see him again for three years, most of the time spent not knowing if he were alive or in one piece. She said she felt like she had lived in sin for 10 days and then gone back home. She told me once she cried because she could not remember what my father looked like he had been gone so long.
She could have sat at home to raise her children, but instead she went to work, a silent women’s libber who balanced it all without complaining or whining. One of the last jobs she had was that of the city clerk, and she ran the city like she ran the rest of her life: efficiently and honestly.
She raised her family, getting her man and her children off in the morning with full stomachs and warm clothes and welcoming them home in the evening with food on the table and a house that was warm, cozy, and wonderful. It was no accident of mere geography that the neighborhood brats and later the teen-aged friends congregated at our house.
She could have quit when my father died suddenly of a massive heart attack, wrenched from her life in a sudden, devastating matter of minutes. Instead, she chose to show the greatest courage of her life even when, only a few weeks later, she fell and broke her hip. She got back on her feet with a little help from modern medicine and spit right in Life’s eyes. With her usual fortitude, she even bested cancer. She did it with a laugh and a poem, of course.
She was a real-life hero, and they’re in short supply today, dying off as the greatest generation disappears one by one. But she will always be a hero to me.
She was my mother.
The author is a man of a certain age who was blessed with his parents and now is blessed with the love of his life, his wife of 37 years.
