Windchimes

Let me tell you about my mother

The title of the latest entry in Cappucine 's journal: Tell me about your mother. It occured to me, while reading the title, that maybe I'm ready to write about Mom a little more now. My biggest problem will be objectivity, of course, since I feel somewhat obligated to eulogize and find it completely useless to complain, now. People who follow an old Mother's Day custom (or it seems old to me because people did it when I was a child) wear some sort of red flower in a boutoniere or corsage if their mother is still living, a white one if she's not. Mom died shortly after Mother's Day, 2004. This year would make my third white-flower Mother's Day, if I wore flowers.

Mom had lots of interesting stories to tell, when she felt like telling, and that was pretty often. Many of them had to do with small teaching successes or overwhelming classroom situations. I loved her coming of age stories best. Mom was a teenager in the 1940's, in rural Nebraska. She had three older brothers, one sister, and two younger brothers. When she wanted to go get her driver's license, neither of her older brothers would take her, claiming "girls don't need driver's licenses." So she "borrowed" one of their vehicles and went to the driver's license bureau herself. I'm not sure if that was before or after she graduated from Wayne State Teacher's College and started her teaching career in a one-room schoolhouse. Mom was not a very tall woman, and one of the big, strapping farmboys sized her up incorrectly on her first day there. She told the story so much better than I do, but the jist of it is, she earned that farmboy's respect on the playground during a recess ballgame. For some reason, Mom batted lefthanded, although she wasn't left-handed with any other activity. Mr. Farmboy was pitching, and Mom heard him tell someone this would be an easy out. Maybe he was a little overconfident and pitched her a fat one. She smacked it. The ball flew out of the playground field and into a cow pasture across the street. She never had much trouble from the kid after that. Nebraska was the last state to have one-room schoolhouses, so that story has a kind of "Little House on the Prairie" ring to it, and maybe it seems to place Mom's first years of teaching in an era bygone years earlier than her first teaching experiences actually were.

Point is, it seems to me Mom had more ambition than was expected or thought decorous for women coming of age in the forties. I think her mother expected her to keep living at home, marry a son of one of the local Swedish immigrant families, and raise children there in rural Nebraska. Mom wasn't interested in looking for a husband, though. She went adventuring. Somewhere, one of us has the slides from the summer she spent in Alaska as a summer missionary. Her and a friend helped a church up there with their summer bible school program. In one of the photos, she's wearing a parka, her face framed in fur, and holding a big salmon she'd caught. I miss all these stories. Not too many years before she died, I took a small tape recorder and tried to get her to tell them while I recorded. Some of them are on that tape, but the process somewhat stymied the stories, like when I took oral exams for German courses.

Somewhere else, one of us has a copy of the newspaper article that announced that one of Wausa's local girls had been awarded a teaching position in Hawaii. In her later years, Mom often said that, had she known how her mother would feel about her going off so far, she might have hesitated. That was before she became a mother herself, though, before she even thought about it. Turned out well for my sisters and I, cause that's where she met my father. She went to Hawaii before it became a state, and somewhere else, one of us has a newspaper from Hawaii, from the day Hawaii became a state. There is also a copy of that teaching contract.

There were other adventures between Alaska and Hawaii. Mom and a friend accepted a job to drive someone's Cadillac from the East Coast to California. She used to talk about how nervous she got while driving through the Colorado Rockies, over the sky-high, narrow roads with no side rails, and how upset she got because her friend was sleeping through most of it. When she woke up, Mom said, "The LEAST you can do is stay awake!" Her friend did the driving for a little while after that.

Once, Mom told me that she had always been rather driven by the fear of not having any money. We were a middle-class family in the sixties and seventies. Sometimes we had rice flavored with ketchup and a small portion of ground beef scattered throughout for dinner. We never went hungry though, and she took us for regular medical and dental check-ups. She had two complete sets of china (she bought one for herself, one was a present from one of her older brothers) and a set of silver. When Mom told me about that driving fear, she sounded rather ashamed of it. I guess it does seem a little incongruous that, in her belief system, God would bring around the right man to marry at the right time, and she never worried about that. The money concerns were stickier for her though.

Mom only became a good housekeeper after all of us were grown and gone. I should add, she'd pretty much retired from teaching by then too. It's not amazing at all to me that the house got so messy, so often...I'm a lousy housekeeper myself, and don't have half the justification Mom did. She consistently got supper on the table around 5:30 or 6:00, then cleared it off enough to spread out the papers she needed to grade, materials for the bulletin board she planned to put up the next day, or for practicing a craft project to teach to her nine-year-old students. Or the mimeographed sheets, with their neon-blue print.

J.H. Larrew
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