***(from the chronicles written in 1990) The following series, "Foothills of Childhood" is not really a creative writing, not a true embellishing flourish of words. It is merely a journalistic approach of times past which I basically 'compiled' in 1990 to entertain my boyfriend while he passed 5 plus months in jail. well, they can't prove he committed ALL those murders...kidding...he was in for a DUI...one of several. So take your relaxed time, and don't expect a Pulitzer Prize winner here. Okay?
Part 12 (Mother)
How could an account of ones past leave out this chapter? She was always 16. She never realized it, and I didn't either, until many years past the age myself. It finally occurred to me that the reason for her total inability to grow up past a certain nature, was the fact that she got married at the age of 16, and was in fact the youngest daughter in a large family and hadn't the chance nor the inclination to become any older.
She was an artist of crafts; mostly needle work, knitting, crocheting, seam-stressing. Mother would sit for hours next to a radio and complete one work after another. Sometimes they were teeny tiny dresses on little one inch gummy plastic baby dolls made way back in the 40s and 50s. They attached to a pin and were worn on blouses and hats or purses, or hankies. Sometimes she crocheted edging and design work on hankies, an item women for a long time unfortunately could not do without. Hers were unique. Lovely from the obvious first glance, if one lifted the lovely lacy skirt on the little ladies of Mother's hankies, the view was the revelation of what one would find under the skirt of the real thing. Mom had a great sense of humor. Even if it was illegal.
It was my luck to be born when she was about to embark into menopause, the excuse for every sort of peculiar behavior known to woman kind. As a tiny child I observed her risque behavior daily when I accompanied her to the local village shops. It was at times so embarrassing as to be intolerable. We were after-all a Puritan society and backwoods politicists in our place and time. Mom was something of an outrage. She said what was expected to most people she met, then would unexpectedly say or do something that would cause us to roll our eyes back in our heads, while the eyes of others just grew too big for their heads entirely.
My sister always tells the grimacing tale of Mother during 1950 taking a drink in the grocery store on a hot summer day, and then swiping up her dress to wipe the drips from her chin. I'm not sure modesty was the question here, as much as the choice of underwear might have been. Mom being an economist, wore underwear until it was merely a memory. It hung on a clothes line for all the neighborhood to look through, translucent as fog at thigh noon. Her old timey version of thong wear. They never had elastic left around the legs....ventilation? and she never wore nylons above the knee. This is not an attractive picture; maybe for Jane Russell, it would have been. But Mom was a bit more corpulent.
And she told dirty stories. Told them to men too. And laughed quite loudly at herself, tears in her eyes. She was certainly not a prude. Sort of strange, how some folks come up in the world with the proverbial silver spoon in the teeth and seem to have no class whatsoever. Maybe she just didn't feel she needed to cultivate any, starting out life very affluent and all. Or maybe being mostly German, even if you are half German and half anything else, - you are still mostly German, she didn't even respect class. I knew from viewing her siblings in group, that none of them seemed to recognize or need any class at all. All of the siblings explained that father August Simon was the epitome of peasantry with power, no class...needed. They were hard, with a type of humor that makes Lenny Bruce seem childlike.
Mom refused to keep house. This I hated. It was painful for me to have friends come to the house under these conditions. There was a piano in one room that was littered with photos in frames. The photos grew to become a mass of misplaced persons among books, clothing, dishes, knick knacks, garbage, gum, coins, records, crayons and lots of things buried which I could not see. She allowed me artistic freedom to decorate the walls with crayons to my full height all the way around the rooms. The wall paper was gangrenous anyhow, and the floors, old linoleum throws.
Any chair in the house became a repository for clothing, all mixed from fresh to fair to really ungood. In the good old days, economy included drying out baby's wet diapers after a pee or two and putting them back on baby a time or two more. That odor comes to my nose in retrospect of Mom's homey environment. The steps to the second floor were stacked with newspapers, way before the days of recycling. What for?? Just in case you needed to pack up some glass, I guess. Or start a house fire....
Anyway I found out centuries later that the reason for this awful lazy resolve was the loss of a previous home when she was first married, one that was a work of art and truly impeccable in every way. In those days, bankruptcy or its nameless equivalent was a moral devastation, the great depression notwithstanding. The loss left her bitter and remorseful and she swore to NEVER keep house again. And in all the years to follow, that promise and prediction was adhered to with ease.
Mom always made us eat everything on our plates. Imagine if something crawled up there that didn't belong. Sometimes it did. I recall the chicken soup with the black spice with tiny legs. Oh, well, not to waste, you know. She wasn't tossing out anything. And we didn't always use a refrigerator. I'm not just sure what qualified to have its use, but lots of roasts and soups just sat out and got ripe for awhile. It allowed us kids the opportunity to get used to the little microbes that attack other normal people and make them sick when they go to Mexico or......Calcutta. We don't get sick from that stuff. We don't ever go hungry either. "No food is too old,"...."I will not serve any food before its time...."
Mom was not a sentimentalist. She would not give-in to feelings, as if she had none. She was always looking for a good laugh or a good piece of cynicism, but old sad movies never entertained her. Maybe she buried the sad stuff years before I ever knew her. The only time I ever saw her shed tears was a time when I was a teenager, and she sat for two weeks at a table with Kleenex tissue pressed to her eyes as she stared out the window at the back yard and the woods beyond. I couldn't figure it out.
The daily routine of this went on as she noticeably lost weight. Then I realized that she might have intercepted a childish note and took it to seriously mean that I was about to run away with a boyfriend and be married somewhere. At least that is the only thing I could imagine at the time. There was no such plan at all in fact, and she never said a thing, so it remains a mystery. It didn't seem to be any good reason for the extreme grief she exhibited, but I was only 16, the age she was, when she ran away and got married......somewhere.
In the backyard and the woods beyond for a couple miserable weeks, she was probably watching her own old sad movie, the one I never detected, coming into replay. I didn't run away to get married, and she never cried again. Never.
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