Inspiration and Heroes

Blue Ridge Butterfly

What got me started thinking about inspiration and heroes happened over the past weekend. In just one short weekend, I had the pleasure of meeting and being in the company of a number of impressive people in a beautiful part of the country. It was refreshing and, without question, inspiring. More about the weekend later, but first a few words about some people who inspire me and why I think of these as people as heroes.

As defined by Merriam Webster, inspiration is the act or power of moving the intellect or emotions. A hero, according to another source might be someone who exhibits any or all of the following traits: courage, honesty, selflessness, bravery and the will to try.

Pat

One of my first heroes was my sister, Pat, or Patsy as we called her in childhood. She selflessly took me under her wing when we were young and has been my constant supporter since. She was a passionate and courageous soldier on the front lines of the women’s rights movement. Despite personal tragedies that might have overwhelmed any of us, she endures.  She invests in her beliefs, including donating time, labor and money to community service.  She is fearless in pursuit of the rights of others, a champion of those who cannot speak for themselves, an animal lover who doesn't just rely on words, but takes action.  She is a good neighbor, a loyal friend and someone who is respected, even by those who disagree with her.  I have admired her from childhood and know how fortunate I am that she's my sister.

Willie Mae

I see the face of my mother-in-law, Willie Mae, when I think of someone whose selfless service to others comes to mind. She is a person who always finds a way to help others, caring for those who need her assistance, whether it’s a ride to the doctor or grocery store or even managing their households when they have no family nearby. She is famous for her chocolate cakes and many hurts have been soothed by not just her sweets, but her sweet concern in times of trouble.  Stoic in the face of illnesses, she treats any personal challenge as a minor setback.  Her time is taken up with thoughts of others.  She has a boundless capacity for love, doesn’t know a stranger and has been relied on by family, friends, church and workplaces through a long and productive life. Many might call themselves Christian, but it is more than words to her.  She lives out her beliefs faithfully. 

There are, of course, so many I’ve been lucky enough to know. My brother-in-law, George, faced cancer with courage, his spirit never truly defeated by a vicious illness that took his life. There’s my friend Elaine’s husband, Tony, also a warrior in the fight against cancer, who spent his last months on earth preparing those who loved him for the time when he would not be there in person. These two men used every last breaths of their lives demonstrating courage and love. Their will to keep trying, to keep living as fully as possible all the way through, is a legacy that inspires all who knew them.

In this trying time when there is much around us that is discouraging, many voices spewing pessimism and distrust, even hatred, it is good to reflect on that which inspires us to a higher plane. There are so many stories of people who find the beauty in life and fight for that, so many incidences of passion and courage and hope. And that takes me back to the weekend where my musings about inspiration and heroes began.

Blowing Rock Lake

The locations for our weekend experience were near Blowing Rock, NC, and along the route between that special aerie on the Blue Ridge and Charlotte. Saturday was fogged in until late in the day and our Audubon group wandered through the gentle rain sheltered by the overhang of maple trees. Leading the “birders” was the Audubon North Carolina’s inspiring Curtis Smalling, a man who knows more about birds than many of us know about ourselves, knowledge he delights in sharing with others. I don’t aspire to know birds just by their calls, but I’m motivated by Curtis’s passion and will hear those calls with greater joy because of it.

So we heard a lot about what his study of sapsuckers has taught him. His storytelling ability is mesmerizing and we got not only lots of great bird lore, but a history lesson from Curtis about the Moses Cone National Park. Even in the fog, it’s an extraordinary place, originally designed to be the mountain estate of North Carolina’s “Denim King.” Now the park, left to the nation by Cone’s widow, Bertha, provides paths enjoyed by runners, walkers, birders, horseback riders, dog-lovers and all comers in a wooded setting where hydrangea bushes abound around a lake.

Situated on the brow of Flat Top Mountain, the Cone mansion now houses the art of the Southern Highlands Craft Guild. The home’s gracious rooms are filled with paintings and pottery, books and wood crafts, music, quilted pieces and blown and stained glass. I found myself circling through the rooms again and again, fascinated and moved by the many ways in which people express their creativity. I left having purchased just one book, a history of the estate, and the determination that I will be there again soon. There is nothing more inspiring to me than being in the presence of creativity.

During the weekend we saw presentations from several Audubon staffers, one joining us from Vermont to share some of that state’s conservation successes. These are people with passion, not just for birds, but for the environment we share with birds. These are people who have found the work that illumines their lives, and challenges they meet with joy and excitement. They motivate those of us who share their concerns to do what we can to make a difference.

On our way back to Charlotte we stopped at a restaurant for lunch and our server, Olivia, shared her story. When I asked if people often comment on her beautiful eyes, she said they do sometimes, but that personal compliments are very much appreciated because of what she has been through in recent times.

The mother of two children, she was laid off from her job in the furniture business in recent times and decided to seize the opportunity by going to college while working, earning two degrees. At the same time, she lost 114 pounds by diligently exercising and changing her eating habits. She painted a wonderful picture of setting up a cross-country skiing machine in her small living room so that she could work out. “It’s pretty gaudy,” she said, “and takes up too much room in our little house, but it’s helped me accomplish my goals.”

Her achievements and her pride in finding success were truly an inspiration. We’re all experiencing the impact of difficult economic times. She has turned a negative into a positive. She likes her work and her boss told me that he relies on her to train other staff members. We finished our conversation with Olivia sharing a long-term dream to build a home “smack in the middle” of five acres in the country that her family has passed down to her through three generations. If I never see her again, I will think of her when I take my walks these cool mornings and I’ll go a little farther for Olivia.

Fall Leaves

I’ll remember for a long time the hours spent this weekend on the Blue Ridge Parkway itself, built 75 years ago by people who carved the “roadway in the sky” across formidable mountaintops. They built bridges, viaducts, tunnels and the roadway itself and their legacy remains one of the wonders of our country. I never travel the Parkway without feeling such gratitude for those who had the idea and those who brought that idea to fruition. There is inspiration all along its stone-bordered miles.

So I find myself, once again, as I do so often these days, feeling such gratitude for the opportunities that come my way. I am grateful, too, for all those I meet who encourage me to keep learning, keep exploring and living my life with purpose and happiness. They are my heroes and they inspire me.

Most photos by Mike Lumpkin

Weddings on My Mind

Michael & Heather

So, having just spent a long weekend in Las Vegas to celebrate our son’s marriage to his dearly loved Heather, I have weddings on my mind. Theirs was a fun affair with only an occasional inclusion of tradition. She did wear a white dress and her father walked her down the aisle, but “Elvis” did the honors and there was so much laughter that there was no room for tears.

The happy couple wore their grins throughout. The guests wore their Vegas-style sunglasses. We all sang with Elvis, laughed with the wedding pair and felt both the sincerity of their vows of love and the spirit of joy in which their “official” lives together began.

Whatever form the ceremony takes, the essence of weddings is the profession of love and a commitment to each other. The traditional vows that reference sickness and health, poverty and wealth were, I suppose, originally designed to remind the couple that life ahead is not without its ups and downs, and to underscore the depth of the commitment that is being made.

Best Man & Groom

Whatever is said in those few minutes when promises are made, the truth of any marriage lies in the years that follow. It is then that we discover how truly demanding it can be to keep our love uppermost in mind and heart when the pressures of work and family heat up. It is then that we learn how rewarding it can be to find compromise that works for both, solutions to problems that might seem overwhelming.

What struck me about the weekend’s wedding was the determination of both people to make this leap of faith and the happiness that flooded their faces as they did so. They are neither too young nor too inexperienced to misunderstand what they are doing or to measure the odds without caution. They know each other well and accept each other as they are.

Surrounded by their friends and family, Michael and Heather looked into each other’s eyes and made their promises. In the spirit of that commitment, I love an old Scottish blessing recalled below and wish it comes true for them.

May the best you've ever seen

Be the worst you'll ever see.

May the mouse never leave your pantry

With a tear-drop in his eye.

May you always keep healthy and hearty

Until you're old enough to die.

May you always be just as happy

As we wish you now to be.

Here's to the Promise of Weddings

Michael and Heather

On Sunday, September 5, 2010, our son Michael will exchange wedding vows with his dear Heather and their life as husband and wife will begin. As it happens, that day will be the 28th anniversary of the day Mike and I were married under our oak tree in Chattanooga. As they make their wedding promises to each other, we can only wish them the happiness we’ve known in these years together.

There is something almost magical about two people finding in each other the person to whom they can make a commitment to become partners in life. It starts with a spark of attraction that grows into love. It is strengthened by time and shared experience, the good times and those not so good, the joys and the sorrows. It is solidified in the acceptance of one another, foible by foible, asset by asset.

So many writers more gifted than I have written about love and marriage. I wouldn’t begin to assume that my thoughts are as lyrical or as wise as many of those. I do believe in the bond that is forged between two people as a contract of the heart, entered into hopefully and lived out day-by-day.

I believe that two people begin as individuals, different from one another, and embark on a discovery of where their mutual interests may take them together. It seems clear to me, despite some who say they become “as one,” that the healthier relationships allow them to remain the individuals that they are in a process of learning what each will embrace in the other and how each will look to the other to balance assets and backstop weaknesses. I believe that the two individuals will learn to fight for the independence of each while creating a partnership that respects both.

It seems to me that a key lesson learned in relationships is acceptance of fallibility, both in oneself and in one’s partner. I wouldn’t expect of anyone acceptance of that which is inherently wrong, if it exists, but only acceptance of what is inherently human. Coupled with acceptance is forgiveness, again both of oneself and one’s partner. That fallibility which we all share must be forgiven if we are to move forward together, allowing ourselves to love and support our partners.

What I have learned in marriage is that I will never understand how it works, but that I know I value my marriage and I want it to work. At my core is my desire to live a happy life, to appreciate the blessings of being alive. My desire in marriage is to allow that happiness for myself and my husband, as much as possible. Fate will deliver us enough pain and sadness; we don’t need to create it for ourselves. Our ability to weather the difficult times will be strengthened by our awareness of the good in our lives and the way in which we cherish that goodness.

What I have found in my 28 years with Mike is the challenge of his fine mind, the comfort of his good heart and the joy that comes from two souls finding common ground in laughter and gratitude. Someone commented to us not long ago that they are surprised that we still thank each other for so many small things each day. I think we have learned that no day can be taken for granted, that no act of love and caring, however insignificant it might seem, should go unappreciated.

As Michael and Heather begin their married life together, I wish for them laughter and love, tears and joy, all the wonders of human emotion harnessed in a common direction with their commitment to one another. As I look at the bond they have already forged, I see good years ahead together, side by side, one enriching the other’s experience of life. I love them dearly and look forward to watching their future unfold.

Sweet Cooking Memories

Sometimes it’s really soothing to think back to a “simpler” time, retreating from the concerns of the present. Of course, a study of history will confirm that there have never truly been simpler times, just different times. It is, apparently, human nature to recall the pleasant memories of times gone by and skip over the negatives that were surely there, but don’t make for good memories.

When I think back, my tendency is also to remember the good things, the happy times. In Southern families like the one of my childhood, happy times often coincided with food. For my parents’ generation, one that had been hungry during the Depression and known rationing during World War II, food was love. My mother and her parenting peers didn’t worry about childhood obesity as we do today, but found ways not just to feed their children, but to feed us abundantly and introduce us to all the flavors their culinary skills might devise.

Recently I wrote about “Depression food,” the dishes my mother used to stretch the meat in our diet further with starches and vegetables. She was quite creative and successful in this endeavor. We loved her vegetable beef soup, not because it was full of beef, but because the minimal amount of meat was augmented with vegetables. In summer months, these were put into the pot fresh from the garden. In the winter, they came from canned produce, some of it put up by relatives.

Mama’s real love in cooking, I believe, was sweets, desserts of all sorts. She had a special love of baking cookies, making several different kinds every Christmas to give to family and friends who might come to visit. One of my longtime friends, Sara, having read some of Mama’s recipes that I posted recently, remembered Mama’s “Stone Jar” cookies. Honestly, I hadn’t thought of those in years due to my ongoing preoccupation with foods that don’t add sugar and other fattening ingredients to my diet.

Sara, however, remembered the Christmas experience with these particular favorites from Mama’s kitchen and suggested that I provide the recipe for them. I rummaged around and found the recipe and have provided it below.

Mama’s Stone Jar Cookies

Ingredients:
1 cup Crisco
1 tsp Salt
1 tsp Vanilla
1 tsp Nutmeg
2 cups Brown sugar, packed firmly
3 cups Flour, sifted
2 Eggs
1 tsp Soda
¼ cup Milk
½ cup Pecans, chopped

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Combine Crisco, salt, vanilla and nutmeg.
Add sugar gradually, making sure to cream thoroughly. Add eggs to mixture. Mix half of flour sifted with soda and mix in. Add remaining flour, milk and chopped pecans. Let the batter stand for about ten minutes (can be covered and refrigerated overnight). Drop from teaspoon onto greased baking sheet and flatten with the bottom of a water glass. Bake for about ten minutes.

Makes about six dozen cookies

In reading this recipe, you might notice the word “about” used a couple of times. That word indicates something about Mama’s cooking (and my own, I admit). She might include specific amounts of ingredients in her written recipes, but she understood cooking to be more art than science. Thus, depending on the weather and the oven and a myriad of other factors that might influence the outcome, these cookies might take ten minutes to bake or maybe twelve. When she was baking, she was in the kitchen from beginning to end of a project. There were no time-outs. In fact, I remember more than once being told to “watch the cookies” if she needed to “excuse herself to attend to personal matters.” If she had an oven full of cookies, more than one family member might be pressed into service to help get cookies off the pans or put them on the racks to cool. At Christmas, the sheer volume of what she produced often demanded this assistance.

Remembering Mama in the kitchen brings back several mental pictures that make me smile. One of them is, of course, the obligatory tasting opportunities that arose. When the cookies emerged from the oven, if any of us kids (or Daddy) were around, we were conscripted to taste the first batch to make sure they were turning out right. Typically the smell of cookies baking drew us like vultures and she rarely had to call out for tasters.

But tasting the baked cookies wasn’t the only gustatory option. If we hadn’t done anything within a couple of hours that she felt deserved either punishment or her disappointment, we were allowed to “lick the bowl and spoon” of any leftover smidgens of batter when all the last of the cookies had been put in the oven. She was economical, so left little batter to be had, but we loved this special treat and were willing to pay the price for it. He or she who “licked” also washed the bowl and spoon and anything else she needed washed.

I have a very fond memory of my mother and aunt in the kitchen together, cooking. Like Beaver Cleaver’s mother, my mother and aunt would go right into the kitchen in the dresses they were wearing rather than change clothes. They would tie an apron around their waists and get to work. What they also did for comfort in a hot kitchen was roll down their hose around their ankles.

In the 50’s women wore hose and would not be bare-legged when wearing dresses. There were no panty hose then, so they would simply unhook the hose from their girdles or garter belts and roll them down into funny-looking concentric tubes just above the ankle. There was a time in my life when I found this somehow embarrassing and unseemly, perhaps when I was in puberty and most of my mother’s life was an embarrassment. Now, however, I remember that practice and can’t help but smile with affection.

Their generation had endured much. Thus, they were thankful for the bounties of post-war America, happy to have children in the house (with no sense that a birth control pill would change everything for the next generation) and managed to share their homes with their parents or their husbands’ parents as that older generation aged and needed to shelter in their children’s homes. My father’s father lived with us for as much as a decade in the last years of his life. My aunt hosted first her own mother and grandmother, then my uncle’s parents in their last years.

As I said at the beginning of this, they weren’t really simpler times, just different times. Those times had their problems and burdens as we have our own today. But there were so many good times and there are so many good memories, many as sweet as Stone Jar cookies. I’m grateful for those memories and hope our generation is providing some good memories for our children and theirs in the years to come.

Celebrating Friendship

Photo by Mike Lumpkin

I just came across a favorite quote on the front of a note card: “A friend is someone who knows all about you, and still likes you.” It seems particularly appropriate to me as I have reveled this week in the joys of friendship.


For two wonderful days, Mike and I shared our home with friends of long standing. We shared meals, a drive through the North Carolina mountains, an afternoon boating on the lake and a funny movie. Best of all, we talked about things that really matter to us and we laughed together about the follies of life, including our own foibles.

I shared a well-written newspaper column with friends and got thoughtful responses, including one asking for more information about our son’s impending wedding. Tell me more, she said, and I loved her anew for caring about those I hold closest and most dear.

Later in the day she shared news of another friend and I reconnected with someone else who has known me for decades and still thinks I’m worth knowing and loving. Just thinking of her makes me smile and even as she encouraged my blogging with her kind words, I remembered working on the high school newspaper where my love of writing was encouraged and I recalled so many fun times we all had then.

And so it goes. We find each other at various points in our lives and friendships are forged. Over the years these relationships wax and wane, perhaps, as we follow different paths. We scatter across the country, even across the globe for job opportunities or family changes. But when we come back together, there is still that initial connection that draws us together.

Sometimes our connection is only the memory of when we knew each other first or when we spent time together in the neighborhood, at school or a workplace. If we’re lucky, and I have certainly had more than my share of luck, the connection is re-ignited in reunion and we either pick up where we left off or even refresh the bond and it grows stronger.

In less mature years, I thought of friendship as the bond between people with common interests, similar opinions and probably similar backgrounds. Those common experiences laid the groundwork for two people to create the foundation of a relationship. I’ve learned over time that many of my most treasured friendships are with people whose experiences have been quite different from mine and those differences are sometimes the spice that makes the relationship meaningful.

I now have friends whose social, political and religious views are very different from mine. Sometimes these are differences we can discuss without rancor, sometimes not. When the differences are too painful for conversation, we simply opt to leave those topics out of our conversations. We seek and find common ground that allows us to continue to love and support one another, aside from those areas in which our disagreement would pull us apart. I have learned that it’s possible to disagree vehemently with friends, yet keep my disagreement to myself. I have come to understand that there is room in my life for many points of view and the fact that someone doesn’t see eye to eye with me is not a reason to avoid them, as long as we are mutually respectful of each other’s right to differ.

In fact, I find myself wishing that our public discourse could focus less on our differences and more on looking around us to find ways in which we can care for each other and for our country, rather than how to “best” one another. I am confident in my beliefs and feel no threat from those who don’t see the world the same way. I believe, in fact, that despite our differences, we can achieve important goals if we are willing to value one another more than we need to influence one another toward our own point of view.

Friends are a critically important part of my life. They are, many of them, an extended family that enriches my experience of the world in so many ways. They encourage me, they challenge me and I hope I do the same for them.

It has become a habit for my husband and me to walk early each morning on the shores of our beloved lake. One of the joys of those walks is watching the wildfowl that make their lives there and begin our days with their activities.

The geese are particularly interesting, honking and stirring as they move out of the coves where they have spent the night and into the grass or onto the lake. They honk and flutter, sometimes stirring suddenly off the water and taking flight noisily, for no apparent reason. Out of a group of domestic geese that once lived here, only one remains. It swims and waddles with the others, then is left alone when they fly away since it doesn’t fly. Wherever the flight has gone during the day, the geese are regrouped again the next morning with the single white one sailing close by its Canada goose companions.

In the spring they show off their babies, teaching them how to forage and how to swim. The geese have a lesson then for all of us. The entire gaggle watches over the young geese with the adults surrounding them on land and water, wary of us and any other potential danger that might come their way. The white goose is a part of this protective nursery, willing to challenge us if we seem too close with a hiss as fierce as any. Clearly, she is not the mother, but she cares for the young ones and is loyal to her “friends.”

In her way, she understands, as I do, the value of community, the grace of friends. I begin and end each day grateful, so thankful for the love and comfort of friends. Each day, too, I give thought to how I might be a better friend to those who are such good friends to me.

Thomas Jefferson, a man of great intellect, said it well: "I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man's milk and restorative cordial."

Mama's "Depression" Cooking

Mama, so young

So I wrote about Mama and said she was a good cook in the 50’s, a woman who could stretch a small budget to feed six people and have leftovers. I also said that someone told me once that some of her recipes might be called “Depression” food because they were probably created during the Great Depression when people couldn’t afford much meat and found ways to augment it with rice and other starches, and vegetables they could grow in their backyards.

I decided to publish a couple of Mama’s “stretcher” recipes here not because we’ve returned to the Great Depression, but because they are actually pretty darn good recipes. If you try them, let me know what you think.

RICE DINNER
Ingredients:
1 pound ground beef or turkey
½ cup chopped green pepper
½ cup chopped celery
½ cup chopped onion
3 tbsp cooking oil
salt and pepper to taste
2 cans whole tomatoes (15 oz. cans)
1 cup rice, uncooked
Directions:
In a large saucepan or skillet, sauté onion, celery and pepper in small amount of oil. Add beef or turkey and brown. Reduce heat. Mix well and spread as bottom layer in pan. Coarsely chop tomatoes and spread (with juice) on top of beef or turkey. Evenly sprinkle rice on top and cover tightly. Cook on low heat for about 1 hour or until rice is done. (Add water if necessary.)

This one sounds simple, eh? It is. It does, however, require some watching. Mama often spent the entire time it was cooking in the kitchen not far from the stove, sometimes making biscuits to go with the meal or chopping up fresh fruit to be served with a little sugar on top as needed. If we had fresh strawberries, some of the biscuits might include some sugar and we’d eat them with strawberries on top for dessert.

We might also have green beans or peas from Daddy’s garden to go with this dish. I don’t recall many green salads being served at our table. Daddy didn’t grow lettuce and we weren’t finding it in stores as readily as we do today. Nobody back then would have imagined we’d be getting lettuce already cut up in plastic bags!

Daddy & Mama

One more staple from Mama’s recipe box was Country Fried Steak. This was a favorite of my father's and was usually served with mashed potatoes.  Don’t be misled by the use of the word “steak” here, by the way because the whole point of this dish was that it was based on cubed steak, a cut of beef that is still available, but was more popular in middle-class homes back then because it was the cheap way to eat beef. Cubed steak, for those who haven’t had it, is meat that requires beating before cooking to tenderize it. Mama did this with either a wooden mallet or the top of a Coca-Cola bottle, the old kind that was made of glass and in our house had multiple uses after the Coke was out of it. Despite this less than glamorous introduction, I will tell you that this is one of my favorite dishes (when I’m not dieting) and one that my son requests from my kitchen.

COUNTRY FRIED STEAK
Ingredients:
1-2 pounds cubed steak, tenderized (Beat it within an inch of its life, folks)
½ cup flour
1 dash salt
1 dash pepper
1 stick butter or margarine
1 cup milk
Directions:
Mix seasonings with flour and dredge both sides of beaten steak. In electric (or large) skillet, heat butter. Brown both sides of steak in butter; cook until done. Remove steak to platter and hold in warm oven while making the gravy. Using the same skillet, add more flour and butter (if needed) and brown slightly. Then add milk and cook, incorporating browned beef bits (we called “scrumples”) and stirring frequently, on low heat until gravy is at desired consistency. Serve gravy hot over steak, cooked rice and/or biscuits.
Note: The Armstrongs are partial to gravy with “body” rather than the classically smooth or thinner gravy.

Now, as with all my cooking, I’m prone to experiment and add my own touches. So these days I’m partial to coarse ground black pepper and garlic powder in recipes like these. I encourage anyone who cooks to try things. The only right way is the way that you or those you are serving enjoy the food.

Mama hasn’t always approved of my innovations, by the way. She grew up with the notion that the way to cook green beans was all day in a pot with fatback. In an attempt to live a somewhat healthier life, I steam green beans. The first time I served them, slightly crisp, but I thought really tasty, she was appalled. “What have you done to these green beans,” she asked with horror. When I told her I steamed them, she huffed and said she was surprised to find that I’d taken up Yankee cooking methods.

There’s no question that her green beans, steeped in fatback and juices all day, did have a wonderful taste. They tasted, of course, the same way that anything cooked that way would taste—like the fatback with which they were cooked. I couldn’t convince her that the naturally sweet taste of the beans themselves, steamed briefly, could compare. Actually, I assured her, I like both, but since I don’t work all day in the fields, I can’t afford to eat the way people used to eat. I also don’t work the same way Mama did then, on her feet much of day, ironing, cooking and sewing and sometimes going to work in an office, as well.

Mama's kids

For those who look over their shoulders for “the good old days,” I say “not me.” I had a wonderful childhood, thanks to Mama and Daddy, and I’m grateful for that. I’m also happy that our world has changed in the way the world always changes. Some things change for the worse, some for the better. I wouldn’t trade the time period I’ve known for any other. I don’t think Mama would have, either.

The picture above was taken some time in the 50's.  That's me on the left (with the strange hairstyle), my brother Buddy and my sister, then known as Patsy.  The dog's name was Inky.  I think she liked Mama's cooking, too, because she and her companion dog, Bingo, were always underfoot in the kitchen, hoping for a scrap or two, usually competing for those with one of our cats.   

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.