A Long, Long Time Ago
St Louis, MO
November 7, 2018
Her own mother, who by all accounts was in the room three score and ten years ago, always acted as if November 10 was the date my mother was born.
Official records and embedded tradition favor the 8th. Following established convention, and our impatience to wait two additional days, so do we.
As December 25 is a universally agreed date to celebrate an event of uncertain chronology yet monumental import, so today we drop calendar questions and raise champagne glasses…honoring a woman who undoubtedly looks and acts at least two days younger than most seventy year-olds.
Like a congressman packing laws dense as Christmas pudding, and then being hired to help companies find the plums, my mother has impressively stuffed and milked her first seven decades.
But unlike those distinguished chiselers and connivers angling for the meat in someone else’s burger, my mother only plucks and distributes fruit from trees she herself has planted. Reaching shore on the crest of another’s wave has never been her style.
Si jeunesse savait et vieillesse pouvait…so the French lament the misalignment of age, wisdom, and ability…a disequilibrium from which few are immune.
As well and for as long as anyone I have known, my mother has arbitrated and held these hostile forces in a delicate balance and fragile peace.
Unanticipated circumstances compelled, and her inordinate determination enabled, my mother to expedite her youth while shifting and channeling its energies to meet the sudden responsibilities of life.
Starting and sustaining a business, supporting and raising children, and traveling and absorbing the world (which, in brilliant fashion, actually facilitated the first two achievements) are lifelong accomplishments of which anyone would be proud to boast.
Not my mother.
Of her accumulated attainments she has never emitted a peep of overweening pride. The only achievements of which she has ever bragged, and then only to Jerry when they initially met, are her acumen as an attorney and her prowess as a pianist.
Yet even these hidden talents were proclaimed, in subtle diplomatic style, on foreign soil to a man she expected never to see again.
Such modesty is in today’s world as rare as using a party-line to order an icebox from a Sears Catalogue.
This humility, and an admirable reluctance to embarrass those of lesser ability, has restrained her from ever showcasing (or even speaking of) her legal or musical expertise in public.
Meanwhile, with her sons she always applied the right touch…scolding sparingly, always when necessary, never gratuitously.
Directives to her children were put upon us in the manner of a new garment…initially stiff and stern, but becoming more comfortable and accommodating with time.
Indeed, she has always known how to ally herself with time, realizing it dissolves more problems than most men solve.
Of course, even her tolerance and patience had limits.
Language and logic have always mattered to my mother, a master wielding both. Words intentionally false or irredeemably foul were not permitted or conveyed to her sons during their impressionable years.
She let us know that from even the greatest of men the smallest of lies are corrosive, producing an effect similar to a drop of sewage in a crystal magnum of Champagne.
Cursing was kept below the radar of our small ears, and the type gutter language one might find scattered across the most private of public walls was never spoken within those of our home.
Mom does not easily suffer ideas or arguments so half-baked or undercooked that a skilled vet could save them. Though rarely guilty of such logical lapses, she has been known to offer periodic utterances susceptible to correction.
On such occasions, she yields to no one in her ability to evade the issue by becoming more slippery than a wet Paris sidewalk covered in fresh autumn leaves.
Let’s subpoena a representative example to marvel at the technique…
“Jerry, while we were out we picked up lunch. You said this morning that you wanted turkey, so that’s what I ordered.”
“Thanks, but I actually said I wanted a salad.”
“Same thing.”
Simple. Disarming. Genius.
Oh sure, she routinely forgets or conflates the names of her husband, sons, grandsons, and brother, any of whom would recognize the situation I last experienced six weeks ago, when she tried to get my attention:
“Jerr…,Bre…,Geor…,Alexan…(sigh),…you there….with the holes under your nose…whatever your name is…”
“JD?”
“Right. That’s what I said. Can you please bring the chair from the living room?”
“You mean the Dining Room?”
“Same thing.”
But my mother’s tendency to remember our names the way George W Bush recalled former Soviet republics has nothing to do with a deterioration of the mind.
No…she has always done this, so we take comfort knowing the portion of her mind responsible for identifying (or forgetting?) loved ones is as sharp as it ever was.
To that mind, as Athenian pilgrims to the Delphic Oracle, we have all come at one time or another for reliably sage counsel.
Whether contemplating or regretting a business venture, a personal relationship, an educational opportunity, a whimsical project, or a spontaneous endeavor, my mother is high on the list of advisors on whom anyone reading this would (and does) rely for sound advice. Like most of us, I have done so often, and never regretted it.
About my mother I could go on, ringing in long harangues like a brazen pot which, when struck, continues to sound till stilled by a calming hand.
The hand bringing such relief is that of the clock, signaling the approach of the 8th, the moment for extending birthday wishes and a brief stroll down a few of the paths that led her to this milestone seventy years after the day she was born…
…or perhaps that is actually two days from now?
Same thing.
JD
