Poetry, Music, Visual Art in My Personal Distant Past

Saved by my mother

The much-folded sheet of lined, looseleaf paper holds faint lines written in pencil. In what year? Sometime in the early 1960s, but there is no date. Here is a poem I’d forgotten I wrote:

“Bravado”

Behold the tragic hero.

I have wronged him, so he thinks.

And yet his head is held up high

While troubled spirit sinks.

He wants no pity, no not ye,

Nor any sympathy.

It is a point of honor

That he act courageously.

His tears are locked within his heart.

He mustn’t let them show.

That I should great him thusly!

Oh, such a cruel blow!

I too have known this feeling

Of despair my little man,

And others have been knowing it

Since first the world began.

Sitting in the corner,

His back is ramrod-stiff.

Come here, my silly little lad,

And give your mom a kiss!

—

The twist at the end was undoubtedly influenced by short stories of the mid-twentieth century.

And then there is this --

When the sheet of paper is folded up again or turned over, a division problem appears: 675 divided by 12, yielding a solution of 56.25. I think I know the reference to the problem, and that would date to 1963 or 1964, the year my violin teacher persuaded my mother that I needed a better instrument if I were to continue to make progress. Payments of $56.25 a month for a year purchased a very nice old French violin, made by Claudot in 1899. I had the violin until the late 1980s, when I sold it to finance my first trip to Paris.

—

Visual art was not my strong suit. We non-artistic types had a few art classes in junior high school, but I certainly never signed up for drawing or painting or anything like that in high school, so this piece my mother held onto must have been something I did in junior high. I seem to remember that we chose pieces of colored construction paper from a box and arranged them, then painted the resulting arrangement. 

Such were my limited girlhood talents, precious in the eyes of my mother, I guess.

Save Your Kids the Trouble?

I stacked boxes on front porch

My mother was not a hoarder, by any stretch of the definition, but she did accumulate a lot of stuff in her home of 68 years. Three children grew up there. Also, my mother loved clothes and jewelry and knick-knacks and holiday decorations. She was a reader — books, newspapers, magazines. (No, she did not stockpile the old newspapers and magazines: those were recycled, as were many of the books that didn’t come from the library.) Photographs, clippings, old family-designed and -crafted holiday cards, and other souvenir mementos meant a lot to her, too. So when she died recently, my sisters and I had a lot of sorting to do, and we haven’t finished the job yet. Not everything that feels significant during grieving is personal, as I wrote in my last post, but a lot of it really, really is.

And there were some wonderful, heartwarming surprises awaiting us! One priceless treasure was a scrapbook our mother had put together in the middle 1940s, when she and our father were dating, then became engaged, and eventually married in Chicago and embarked on their new life together in Aberdeen, South Dakota. My sisters and I had never seen this scrapbook before. It was hidden away (why hidden? simply forgotten?) on the back of a top shelf. Along with saved slips of telephone messages and theatre programs and tickets, our mother had written notes on the pages to which the souvenirs were pasted. 

On the first page of the scrapbook is a theatre program from early 1946. My father (not yet my father) had come by train from South Dakota (where he led a survey crew for the Milwaukee Road) to Ohio to visit his father and stepmother in Columbus and stopped in Springfield on his way. In Springfield he and my mother (not yet my mother) attended a play. There is a note left at my mother’s office (she worked as a secretary after high school graduation; the college scholarship she was awarded would have paid half her tuition, but her parents could not afford the remainder) saying that “Mrs. Gilbert” had called. That would have been my father’s stepmother in Columbus. Subsequently my mother made a trip out to South Dakota to see my father, and they became engaged. We girls did know about the trip and the engagement. As my mother said, she knew she’d better come home with a ring after traveling so far to visit this man!

A letter dated August 23, 1946 (not pasted into the book), from the woman we always called Auntie Grace, our mother’s best friend and roommate before Grace and Gene were married in 1945, was signed “‘Becky,'” Gene & the girls,” her maiden name being (I think) Becker, and she and Gene were married in August of the previous year, so the twins must have come along right away. “Just a year ago today you arrived in Kazoo for my wedding. Seems like years have passed since then!” She writes in reply to Nora’s news that she and Lloyd are engaged to be married. “Believe it or not I wasn’t even surprised — just ever so happy for you. I guess I’ve sort of known all along that “this was it.” It just sounded “right” for some reason or other. I called Gene right away and when I said “Nora’s engaged!” he just said “Yes” — he’d expected it too.” Grace/'Becky' hopes Lloyd will be transferred from Aberdeen, South Dakota, to Chicago so the two couples will live closer to each other. That didn’t happen, but in 1950 my father changed jobs and went to work for a smaller railroad (from the Milwaukee Road to the Elgin, Joliet, & Eastern), and he and my mother and I moved to Joliet, 45 miles southwest of Chicago, where my two sisters were born. 

newspaper wedding story and wedding corsage

On the page with the newspaper story of their wedding, with my mother (not yet my mother) looking radiant and beautiful, she had written by hand on the now-brittle page, “My lovely double white orchid corsage — many envious glances were directed at this!!” (My mother was the queen of exclamation marks all her life!) Wedding luncheon at the Blackhawk Hotel in Chicago: Grace and Gene were there in Chicago for the wedding, along with my mother’s mother and Phil Mueller, best man. Who was Phil Mueller? HIs name is unfamiliar to me. 

“On Decoration Day [this would have been 1947] we moved into Ted & Anne Streibel's while they were out of town for the summer, Ted on the Sperry Car, & Anne & children visiting. August was a terrifically hot month — and Dr. King says I’m right about being pregnant! On one of the cooler evenings we took in our first rodeo — Edna joined us (Bob in Madison now).” She was pregnant with me — barely — and so in a sense my parents’ “first rodeo” was mine, too, as I attended in utero.

Birth announcements, holiday letters, theatre programs, newspaper clippings — she saved everything, but there is nothing more pasted into the scrapbook after the first childless Aberdeen days. Once the first baby came along and then the move to Joliet, Illinois, and, in time, two more babies, my mother’s paper mementos remained loose, in boxes and envelopes. For example, as a senior in high school, I received a National Merit letter of commendation, along with five others in my class. Two or three were awarded scholarships, but our superintendent is quoted in a newspaper article as saying he is proud of all of us. (One of the other letter recipients, a boy from my homeroom, I learn died two years ago. How is that possible?) Ephemera, all of it.

Her daughters only saw our mother’s scrapbook after she died, when one daughter discovered it high in a bedroom cupboard. Had she forgotten she had it? What if my mother had decided to clean out those cupboards and “get rid” of all that old stuff, “to save her kids the trouble”? I shudder to think of what we would have missed!

Not all objects remaining in the family home are equally precious, but each speaks to me of my mother: 

Child scribbles -- mine? -- in an old looseleaf cookbook

Battered box heavy with coins to be donated to church ladies' circle

Souvenir Leelanau shirt from July visit

Cast iron skillet perfect for cooking a single egg

A grade school class picture, she 2nd from L in 2nd row

With her brother, stepfather, mother, and sister

Not stylish, but warm -- and she loved it!

Also, going through these things together has been and continues to be an important grieving and bonding experience for my sisters and me. Our mother’s death was unexpected. I thought she would live to be 110. She was fine only the day before she went to sleep for the last time. In one way, you might say it’s “trouble” or “a lot of work” to go through her things, and so it is, but that’s not the whole story. These tasks are valuable to her children in their mourning process.

Sister Deborah

Sister Bettie

Death and Donkeys

Donkeys outside Arizona ranch bookstore

Death, donkeys, and books, that is. Let me explain.

We can probably agree that life is a mystery, and love is strange, but nothing is stranger or more mysterious than death, and not that every death feels the same, for each brings its own universe to bear upon the bereaved. When one’s mother dies, whatever her age, a watershed comes to divide life into before and after. And, as I’ve noticed with other people in their days of mourning, the most trivial and contingent encounters can become magnified into significance within the aura of death.

My son and my mother

My mother would have been 96 years old in October. She was still living in her own home, doing her own laundry and fixing her own meals, very active socially and in her church (overlapping domains, those), enjoying meals out with friends, spending time with family, reading books and newspapers, working crossword puzzles, and caring for her two companion cats. We (daughters and sons-in-law) worried about her going up and down basement stairs to do laundry and tried to persuade her to think of selling the old family home and moving to an apartment, but she “wasn’t ready,” she said. And so one day her youngest daughter took her to the doctor (she was fine) and downtown to pay her property taxes, and later that day she talked to her middle daughter on the phone. I would have been calling or sending her a postcard from Lake Huron or both the next day but instead got a message that she had fallen asleep in her chair and not awakened. 

A good, long life. A good, peaceful death. And yet, now, for her daughters, nothing will ever be the same again. 

An old cookbook I had never seen before

The Artist and I had looked forward to a little getaway after our work-filled summer, so we were over in Alpena, after an overnight in East Tawas and breakfast with friends, when the news came to us. We had crossed the state west to east on Tuesday, recrossed it from east to west on Wednesday, and covered most of the lower peninsula from north to south on Thursday. I took with me the book I’d taken to Lake Huron, A Manual for Cleaning Women, by Lucia Berlin. In every story that mentioned death, that event jumped out at me, but Berlin’s writing, so moving, affected me deeply on every page. Yet the sentence that engraved itself in my heart, because of the time of my reading, was a tearful exclamation from the author’s sister, dying of cancer, which Berlin made part of one story: “I’ll never see donkeys again!” 

My mother will never see Michigan again. I’ll never see my mother at Sunrise Landing again. Donkeys…. Yes, I can easily imagine shedding tears at the thought of never seeing donkeys again, although in my case it would probably be horses. My mother, though — I don’t think she had time for a thought of anything she might never see again, dying peacefully in her sleep as she did. 

She had a lot of clothes but wore this jacket a lot

My husband and I were staying in my mother’s house, the house she occupied for 68 years (I lived there for almost 16 myself), when I came to the end of Lucia Berlin’s book, and I needed something else for those dark but wide-awake 3 a.m. hours. My next choice might seem a strange one — a murder mystery, Critical Mass, by Sara Paretsky -- but circumstances made it a logical choice. Not only are Paretsky’s novels are all set in the Chicago area (my mother lived 45 miles SW of the city), but my mother and one sister and I (the other had a scheduling conflict) had gone to see and hear Sarah Paretsky in person onstage in Traverse City where she appeared as part of the National Writers Series in the fall of 2013. 

This particular volume was also a copy signed by the author and with one of my mother’s address labels on the front-facing endpaper. So whenever I picked up the book, and as I turned the pages, I was reading a book my mother had held and read, written by an author we had gone together to hear speak, and when Paretsky described farms, cornfields, and small towns south of Chicago in the novel, the terrain described (minus murdered bodies) evoked memories of my Illinois girlhood, 4-H and all, and all of us were connected by the physical book as well as the story it told. 

In her kitchen

Years ago, someone I knew only slightly wrote a quasi-philosophical paper around the time of her father’s death, and I was perplexed by some of the books she mentioned in the paper, books that spoke to her at that time in tones of deep significance but that seemed to me tangential at best to her theme. I understand her state of mind better now. In such circumstances, everything is highlighted, foregrounded, important — but by “everything,” I don’t mean contemporary world events as much as the weather, the season, chance encounters and random remarks.  

Both of these books are well worth reading, whether or not you pick them up in a state of grief. For me, though, they will always have added depth, due to the associations that will always cling to them for me.