Since I never miss a chance to brag about my mother, and her birthday’s almost here, let me tell you why I love her still:
She taught me how to read.
When I realized, terrified, that I was going to die someday, she used seemingly dead tulip bulbs to teach me about new life.
She was gifted with flowers, including tulips, but most of all roses.
The same went with fabrics–weaving, knitting, needlepoint, crochet, and sewing (which she disliked, but we had an big black Singer in the living room on Huasna Road.) And a hand loom, far bigger.
When it didn’t sound quite so insulting as it does today, the first superintendent of Lucia Mar, Earl Denton, said that my mother “was the most brilliant woman he’d ever known.” (Her education ended at Taft Union High School in 1939.)
She loved music. We had everything from Disney records–“Tubby the Tuba” and “Little Toot the Tugboat” to Classical LPs and, her favorites and mine, the two Harry Belafonte Carnegie Hall concerts.
She was a marvelous cook. I will never, ever be able to replicate her chicken in white wine sauce, served either atop rice or toast points. I loved Fridays at Branch School because her tuna sandwiches were epic.
We all watched The Ed Sullivan Show on CBS on Sunday nights. Mom’s favorites were Ringo, Petula Clark and, most of all, Diana Ross and the Supremes. (For context, that means that Mom was Beyond Cool for 1965).
Earlier, when we lived on Sunset Drive, we all decided we wanted to be Bedouins. Mom provided burnooses, robes, makeup (Bruce and I had curly mustachioes) for the three kids. And for our Cocker Spaniel, Lady. She had a veil, too.
Her favorite mission was Santa Ines. Coincidentally, it became my Fourth Grade Branch School Mission Project. Many years later, Elizabeth and I would be married there.
She loved anyone who wasn’t quite like us. My college major was in Mexican history. That’s Mom’s doing.
She belived in integrity, in the brotherhood and sisterhood of all human beings, and in Jesus, to whom she held no exclusive rights. She was a devout Catholic who didn’t live long enought to convert.
She grew up in the Great Depression, so our can cupboard on Huasna Road was filled with food she’d never eat. Here she is in fourth grade in Taft. They’re cropped out in this version of the elementary-school photo, but her shoes are badly scuffed.
So what poverty taught her—including the Famine poverty of her Irish great- grandfathers, both name Patrick—had nothing to do with brilliance and everything to do with compassion. Her grandson, Thomas, shows the same quality with the little friend he made in Killarney on a student trip to Ireland.
And Jimmy Carter, a Baptist, who left us just today, showed the same kind of compassion that my mother taught and that her grandson inherited. Here he is, with Rosalyn, working on a Habitat for Humanity project in Memphis.
In 2010, I took AGHS students on another trip to Europe, on a battlefield tour, and one of our stops was at Verdun, the site of one of the most horrific battles, in 1916, of World War I. Here are some of my students atop Fort Douaumont, where 100,0000 French and German soldiers died.
Later, we toured the ossuary, where we could see the anonymous bones of unknown young men in stacks just below Plexicglas apretures.
“Are these your students?” a museum docent asked me. I gulped.
Yes, they are, I admitted.
“They are so respectful!” she said.
Maybe I had taught them that. But my mother had taught me. She was their teacher, too.
A Work in Progress 