Back from the Boondocks

Also known as the Hellhole, accoring to my exiled friend Sally, who's originally from Charleston, SC, and after this trip I have to agree with her. Among the few miserable weeks of my life, this ranks right up there at the top. Pretty much everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong, and if it weren't for Sally and Mel, I might have murdered someone. The capper on all of it was a freak April snowstorm, which started the evening before the memorial was scheduled. Mind you, it was 75 degrees and sunny when I arrived and perfetly Spring-like until this last Friday evening. I just managed to get home through the snow today by having Sally drop me off directly after the service Saturday at the Day's Inn in Alpena (where the pilots stay and hence the only hotel with an airport shuttle) and getting on a 6:30 AM flight to Detroit, where it was also snowing. It's a good thing I got out when I did, because the afternoon flights were cancelled, all two of them. As a consequence of the weather and other bizarrenesses and schedule snafus, not very many people were at Mom's memorial, which was disappointing but understandable. The Canadians never made it over, though they'd intended to come, and neither did Doug and family becuase of the weather. The whole bloody point of having her memorial in April was to avoid dragging people out in blizzards, so this was a totally useless exercise. I might as well have had it in December.

And about the memorial itself, the less said, the better, at least right now while I'm still frothing with rage about it. Suffice to say, I might as well not have bothered to plan anything at all, the way it went.

On the up side, Mel did beautiful flowers for it (no surprise there), including fabulous orange roses that smelled heavenly and looked lovely in Mom's favorite rose vase. And I got a chance to see Aunt Laura, Uncle Bob, and cousins Kathy and Carole, as well as Kathy's kids, whom I hadn't yet met. Kyle was also there—he's gotten so big!—and I met Roman, Kathy's husband, too, finally. Here's the eulogy I wrote for Mom, along with the picture I used in her card (these were a big success, for which I'm grateful, since that's all I got to do for her):

Most of you know Mom from the Kingdom Hall, and some of you a little more from traveling with her to assemblies and occasionally to shows at Wharton Center. Or you know her from growing up with her as children together. Dad was married to her for 47 years. Melanie and Paul and I know her also as the mom who made us pizza, drove us to basketball games and movies, and encouraged our curiosity and ambitions. She was the "cool mom" who liked our music and the stuff we watched on tv. She was the cool mom long after we grew up, too, staying interested in what we were learning and thinking and doing.

Probably the worst thing anyone can say to a daughter is, "you’re just like your mother." That’s because daughters forget that their mothers were once young and reckless and full of their own dreams. My mother was certainly full of her own.

As a young woman, I think she would have liked to be an opera singer, or at least trained her voice to professional quality. She taught me to sing the way mothers do—by singing with me—and trained my ear at the same time, though I never learned to like opera. That was okay though, because I returned the favor in later years by turning her on to jazz, which she grew to love almost as much.

She said more than once that she would have liked to be a missionary and even when she was in Germany, where she didn’t speak the language, she was adamant about going door to door. She got so used to it in Germany that that when she got back to the states, she was corrected at Ministry school for saying "ja" instead of "yes," for the first few months. She loved travel and she used assemblies as an excuse to go to other cities whenever she could. At assemblies, she loved seeing the missionaries in the dress of the countries they were serving.

She was interested in so many subjects that I often wished she’d been able to go to college too, instead of just sending me. I could easily imagine her studying entomology. She loved bugs, a category that included arachnids—spiders to you—and multilegged critters of all kinds, as long as they had more than four. For that reason, I grew up completely unafraid of spiders, unlike most of my friends. How many of you know that, along with her lipstick, Mom carried around a bottled Amazonian beetle in her purse?

The collection of books in our house gives you some idea of the range of topics she was interested in. On the shelves in our house, alongside Dad’s science fiction, military history, and current events, are her volumes of ancient and medieval history; reference books on the Bible and church history; literary novels, paperback mysteries, books about bugs, porcelain, and needlework. There were volumes on art, women’s history and issues, and anthologies of short stories. Her favorite fiction writers were O. Henry, Dorothy Parker, and Isabelle Allende. She loved good literature, but she’d read just about anything that got in her way—a trait she passed on to me.

She liked good food and nice clothes and jewelry, preferably diamonds. She liked going out on the town to have a good time, which meant a nice restaurant meal followed by either theatre or music. She was passionate about music: jazz and pop and classical, but above all, about opera. I think that’s what made her fearless in the door to door work, actually. If you’re brave enough to attempt converting people into opera lovers, attempting to convert them into Jehovah’s Witnesses is cake. I know she chased more than a few of you around with recordings of Marilyn Horne singing Aida, saying, "Just listen! You’ll love it!" Be glad she didn’t wake you up every morning playing Wagner’s "Flying Dutchman" like she did with me one summer. One of the best memories I have of sharing music with her is playing Talking Heads’ album "Fear of Music" for her and watching her laugh until she cried.

What she was, though, besides mother, wife, and servant of Jehovah, was an artist. She learned several types of needlework from her own mother, and our house was filled with needlepoint cushions and pictures, our sheets and pillow cases trimmed with tatting, our beds covered with handmade quilts pieced and embroidered, appliqued and tied—all of which took months to make. When I was in junior high, she made a brief stab at oil painting on canvas, and then took up ceramics. Hers were of the molded variety, and she didn't make her own glazes or throw on the wheel, but she got me interested in both of those aspects. I still have a deep love of handmade pottery of all kinds for that reason. One of the most amazing ceramic pieces she made was an oversized chess set for one of my cousins, the face of each pawn and king and queen and bishop given an individual character: the pawns fearful, the bishops shifty-eyed, the kings a bit dull, the queens crafty.

Her great love, however, was porcelain, and eventually she took up china painting. Her teacher was a lovely woman named, somehow appropriately, Genevieve. It wasn't long before the student surpassed the teacher. Mom bought a small craft kiln of her own, something we hadn't had when pouring ceramics, and started firing her own porcelain. Dad got her a small army-surplus table and a cabinet for her vials of powdered paint. She had a couple of covered palettes, dozens of brushes, and a box of silk rags wrapped around cotton batting for dabbing in backgrounds. She bought "blanks"—white glazed china made by Limoges, Meissen, Rosenthal, Hutschenreuther and lesser potteries—various plates, cups and saucers, odd boxes, trivets and tiles, candy dishes, vases, tea sets, salt and pepper shakers, jam jars, tea sets, whole table settings, clocks, more tea sets. She painted and painted and painted, mostly flowers and fruit, but sometimes birds or scenes. Both of us loved the goofy pieces she bought most: the garlic squisher with its little wooden baseball bat-shaped pestle, the strawberries and cream plate shaped like a strawberry leaf, the Limoges box shaped like a bellows.

One corner of our utility room became her painting corner, where she'd sit for hours while I was in school. In the winter, with the kiln going, it was one of the warmest spots in the house, though it was one of the coldest rooms. Both my friend Paul and I sat there at one time or another, trying to learn to china paint, but it didn't interest me as much as pottery did, and Paul didn't have the patience. So Mom kept at it alone. Many of you probably own a piece or two and you should know that it took days to paint it, from drawing on the initial pattern to hours of carefully watching the kiln during multiple firings. I think one of the reasons she liked to visit the porcelain collections at the Metropolitan Museum was that seeing the work of other china painters there somehow legitimized her own. Not that it needed to be legitimized. I’m a little prejudiced, but I think it was often more beautiful than the work I saw in museums and stores.

One of the songs you heard before or will hear after this service is a jazz standard called "Do Nothing ‘til You Hear From Me," by Duke Ellington, sung by Abbey Lincoln. I imagine this as Mom’s theme song: her way of saying, "Don’t make any wild plans without me." There were dozens more subjects she wanted to learn more about, and places she wanted to go, and arts she wanted to master, and activities she wanted to try. In fact, don’t be surprised if you catch her hang-gliding in the new system. If you catch her at all. I’m sure she won’t be home much.

Thanks for coming to help us celebrate her life and hopes for the future.

Comments

[Egret]

That's a nice eulogy. Sorry you had a crappy trip.

[Your Last Friend in Canada]

I'll always treasure my wedding gift from you, the teacups handpainted by your mom. They still adorn the baker's rack in my kitchen. Sorry things didn't go the way you would have liked and that I couldn't be there.