Remembering Mama

It’s Mama’s birthday today and memories of her flood my thoughts. She died in 2001, just a few weeks before the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. I’ve always been grateful that she was gone before that happened. She didn’t need to experience that.

What she did experience in her life was somewhat extraordinary for a woman of her time. As an independent person in her twenties, she left her family in Atlanta and moved to Albany, Georgia, to live and work there. Acceding to her parents’ wishes, she lived at first in a boarding house run by a family friend.

She moved into an apartment building later and that’s where she met my father. They fell in love, rather tempestuously, I believe, and married. Little was ever said directly about their courtship and early marriage, but there were hints throughout their life together that they found equal footing in both intellect and temperament. Nobody could back either of them down once they had set their course.

My memories of Mama during my childhood center on her ability to feed and clothe three growing children and also make a home for Daddy’s father, all on a limited budget. She was a great cook, finding ways to stretch dollars and turn the simplest ingredients into meals that were not only filling, but always tasty. Interestingly, when I prepared one of her dishes later in life for a boyfriend, he referred to it as “Depression” food. That’s what his mother called dishes that were stretched with rice or potatoes, a tactic that was widely used in the Great Depression. (I’ll post some of her recipes later this week.)

I still have a fondness for seersucker because Mama made so many of our summer clothes from that particular fabric. It was inexpensive, felt cooler than other materials in summer and was, perhaps, the first “wrinkle-free” fabric. All of us, including Daddy, had summer shirts of seersucker in every available pattern. We kids also had shorts and pajamas. She ran that old Singer sewing machine night and day to produce our clothes. Then she put them away carefully at summer’s end so that those items that survived active children could be passed down from oldest to youngest the next year.

Even as a child, I was aware that Mama had a good mind. She read voraciously, as did Daddy, and our home was filled with books and magazines. I’ve always believed that I learned to read before I went to school because everyone else in our house always had their noses in books. I could either be left out or learn to read, so read I did.

In addition to taking care of all of us, Mama found time to include a small menagerie of pets in our household, including cats that had kittens and dogs that produced puppies regularly. She helped with whatever scouting program we were in, too. She sometimes belonged to a garden club, knew the neighbors and could be counted on to provide a dish for new mothers or those with a death in the family. Food was the social currency in our middle-class existence and Mama deftly provided food wherever it was deemed necessary, from church suppers to birthday parties.

She was always busy, always doing something with her hands, preferably using her active mind in the process. Back then, much of our clothing had to be ironed. She would wash the clothes and hang them on the line to dry. Then she would iron those things that needed it, having sprinkled them with water from a Coke bottle with holes in the top. Sometimes this would be the time she talked on the phone with friends. I can still see her ironing away with the phone cradled between chin and shoulder, mostly listening if it was a talkative friend, but often debating one subject or another with someone who challenged her.

She had been a working woman before we kids came along and she returned to work at some point after I, her youngest, went off to school. At that point, my sister Pat, six years older than me and two years older than our brother, became our after-school baby-sitter. Sometimes, depending on Daddy’s work schedule, he might work nights and be at home and awake in the afternoons, so he took the lead on those days.

When Mama went back to work, she took a clerical job with Social Security. As years went by, she was promoted until her final job involved assessing and processing the claims of people who applied for benefits. She alternately came home frustrated and discouraged by their plight or energized and engaged by their personal stories. There were the great Southern names she encountered, like Stillwaters Logan or Jesuslovesme Reynolds. There were the touching stories of births recorded in family Bibles that were lost for years, then found to reveal that someone who thought he or she was 55 was actually 65.

Mama also brought home some office jokes that made Daddy laugh out loud when they were behind closed doors. Only later did I find out how salacious my Mama’s sense of humor could be. Daddy, she told us when we were grownups, would never have condoned those jokes in front of anyone else, but they shared them privately and she made him laugh a lot.

That bawdy sense of humor points to one of the many paradoxes about her. In contradiction to the baseness of the jokes, she was often quite ladylike and encouraged that behavior in my sister and me. She despaired that I was such a tomboy, having protected my long golden ringlets for years, only to finally cut them off and perm my hair rather than endure my complaints about the brushing long hair required. She gave up after entering me in the “Miss Sunbeam” contest to find the girl who looked most like the photo on the Sunbeam bread wrapper. I fought her all the way on that one, wanting neither to have my hair put up on my head nor to put on a dress and patent leather shoes instead of my usual tee shirt, jeans and sneakers.

Another way in which Mama defied being easy to describe or to understand was the way her temper appeared without warning. She could exhibit the patience of Job when anyone else would snapped long before. But she could erupt like Mt. St. Helens, too, her anger blasting forth with a heat that could singe the doorknob of Hell. Her fury was unpredictable, most often generated by something the rest of us had neither noticed nor could name.

She was a hypochondriac, prone to illness when any of us became ill. As I remember it, she didn’t miss work that much, but seemed to have a great many aches and pains, as well as ills without specific symptoms, with frequency. On the other hand, always one with a complex personality, she endured more than one hospital stay for serious and identified illnesses without complaint.

Quick to learn, she loved card games at one point in her life, becoming something of a whiz at Canasta. As long as I knew her she did crossword puzzles, including the ones I still find unfathomable, the ones that come with a blank grid so that the puzzler must create her own grid and figure out where the words go. None of them elicited more than an occasional “well, phooey” from her.

In her last years, a victim of senility and diagnosed with an “Alzheimer’s-like condition,” she once again defied the norms until the bitter end. She was alternately confused and delusional, then bright as a penny, remembering verse after verse of a song sung in her childhood. She was dependent one minute, completely on her own the next. She declared herself ready to “go,” saying that she had had a good life, made peace with her Lord and was not afraid. Only in the final months did she lose her faculties. Even then, when she was no longer articulate, the light was still in her eyes, dimmed only in the last days.

As I think about Mama today, I remember so much to admire, so much that I appreciate. I remain perplexed about the contradictions, confused by the quirks of personality. I realize each day the influence she was in my life and am reminded of a line from a song about how we know each other. The song, a love song, of course, says “you know who I am, who I’m not and who I want to be.” I can’t say that I think she knew me this way and I know I didn’t know her so completely, but I know that I wouldn’t have traded her for any other mother. And I know that, no matter how I’ve fought the notion throughout my life, seeking to be just my own self, there’s a lot of Mama in me.

So on this day that would have been her 95th birthday, I wish she were here to hug and be sung to, here to be appreciated for what she brought into her life and mine. I miss that burning spirit of fire, that intelligence and humor. On this day, I’m grateful for Mama and hope not so much that her spirit is at rest, but rather that it is lighting up whatever space it occupies.

Happy Birthday, Mama, and thanks for the memories.