Mom, Happy 102 Birthday.

I’m sorry you’re no longer here to celebrate it with me.

I don’t write as often about my mom.  One reason is she was not much of a storyteller.  She was more about the pointed quip at just the right moment, and it almost always made you laugh, often because of the surprising timing. 

When my dad died, the preacher from her church came to sit with her, along with me and the Deputy Sheriff who had to stay with his body until the doctor signed the death certificate and the funeral home picked him up.

It went on for hours, and at one point I asked my mom if she was OK with all these people in her house.  She said this: “You mean the preacher?  Doesn’t bother me.  I don’t change just because he’s here.”

My dad sometimes was a little grouchy, and one of his most common utterances on these occasions was “Damnit Audelle!!”  After one of these times, I asked mom how she felt when Dad talked to her that way. Here’s what she said: “Doesn’t bother me.  I just don’t listen.”  To emphasize her point, she sort of raised her hand and flicked her wrist as if she was shooing away a gnat.

That was mom. Unflappable, even that night when a police car pulled up to our house with me in the back seat.  The house was full of guests and relatives for some party or another. The thing that upset her the most what the embarrassment of this being seen.  I had wrecked my friend's car, and the cop thought we were drinking.  We were planning to, but I rolled the car before we got started. We threw the beer into a field and the cops never found them. They searched the field for 20 minutes.  That, plus the slow ride home in the backseat of a cop car was an eternity when you had to pee, and I really, really had to pee. 

Mom was not a very affectionate mom.  I once asked her about that in later years.  Here is what she said: “We were told by Dr. Spok that I should raise you to be independent.”  He wrote books in the 40’s about parenting.  He didn’t believe in coddling. I don’t recall anything that I would call coddling, so I guess she took it to heart.  But it also just happened to support her personality, I guess. She had a way of remaining somewhat aloof, sort of presiding over events.

She was married to her one and only husband for 69 years, so I guess it worked, and I am certainly not one to offer advice for a successful marriage.  The way she got married was interesting, and a perfect reflection of the way she did things.

Mom was born in Lucien, Mississippi in 1920. She was living with her parents, Laura and Robert.  Dad had joined the Navy and was coming home on a short leave.  He sent mom a telegram. It instructed her to meet him at a hotel in Jackson, MS.  As she packed her mother asked her where she was going.  Mom told her, and Nonnie (that’s what we called her) said “Don’t do anything you be sorry for.”  Mom came back from Jackson married, and dad went back to Pearl Harbor and the paradise it was before December 7. That was one of the few stories mom told.

She also talked about how she and a friend took advantage of the free train tickets she got as a result of her father working for the railroad. They would get on the train to somewhere they could reach and get home by dark. She spoke of it as a big adventure, and I’m sure it was, given the time and place in pre-war Mississippi.

Mom and Dad had a rather mysterious courtship.  The story seems to be that Dad pursued her for quite a while, all the while mom remaining aloof to his advances. There is something about finding her working in a five-and-dime store in Little Rock.  The how and why of all that was never fully disclosed.  Anyway, mom was a looker, dad was buffed, and they made a striking couple.

I don’t know if mom had any other suiters, but we all just assumed she didn’t.  That’s hard to believe, but I guess when she sent his picture with the promise “Always” she turned out to be right.  Not until death did they part.

After the war started, Mom followed things from MS. Between the marriage rendezvous and Dad’s return to San Francisco from Pearl Harbor, things are a bit of a mystery.  In San Francisco, he was stationed at Treasure Island Naval Hospital before shipping out again on a troop transport. 

Mom had moved to San Francisco by then, and they took an apartment there. That is where their first child was born, in 1946.

During at least part of the war, mom worked with the American Red Cross.  She kept an armband with her stuff for many years afterward. It was stained and yellowed, but must have meant something important to her.

Mom was the smartest person in the family. When she thought I was getting too big for my britches, she would make me play scrabble with her.  The score was usually like 150 to 12.  She worked crossword puzzles until she was in her 90’s.  She handled my dad with ease and he was no dummy.

We were fortunate to live close to many family members.  Most of dad’s kin remained in Mississippi. But Mom and Dad came to Stockton to stay with mom’s mother, who have moved to Stockton to work in the ammunition factories during the war. She left my namesake, Robert Kennedy back in Mississippi.  Just before I started kindergarten at Victory School, my parents moved from their first home on the east side of town on Bradford Street, to a bigger place on the corner of Pershing and W. Vernal Way.  Nonnie lived half a block away on Vernal.  Two of mom’s sisters, each with two kids apiece, also lived nearby. That made holidays a real hoot.

Like everyone does, mom got old.  Dad died in 2011, and after that, she moved into a group home in Livermore.  This is one of her birthdays in my San Francisco flat.  No, we didn’t eat like this all the time. It was crab season in San Francisco and brought her there for some crabs and white wine.

By then, mom had had a couple of strokes, which made her voice hard to hear.  But she could wind herself up and make herself heard when she wanted to.  Her hearing was a superpower.  If you assumed she couldn’t hear you or thought she was not paying attention to the conversation, you would be wrong.  Her comic timing never missed, and she could crack up the room with fewer words and anyone I know.  Despite her frailties, mom had a way of letting you know she was still in there, joining in.  She didn’t have much to work with towards the end, but she did make it work.

For example, because of her health, when it came time to pour the wine I would fill her glass a little less.  Mom would wait until I poured for everyone, survey the glasses, look at hers and hold it up, but not for a toast. She would look at me with a stern expression and say, “What about mine!”  She was calling my attention to the fact that her glass wasn’t as full as the others.  There was no defense.

The thing about mom, she was solid as a rock.  I counted on that without realizing it and was grateful for our time when I could visit.  Mostly towards the end, I was there to entertain her, as she couldn’t talk much.  She was suffering from some dementia, and to keep the conversation going, I brought some of her old photo albums.  She could name many people from the photos, but the one thing she couldn’t get right was identifying me in the pictures as an adult. She kept calling me Louis.  After a while, I stopped trying to correct her.  Bless her heart.  At 97, who am I to argue?

She passed away quietly in 2017 after one final stroke.  Happy Birthday, momma.  We had a good life together while it lasted.