Best Parts of Me

 

Not long ago my 93-year-old parents came to visit me at the lake.    My 93-year-old parents got into their car in Mansfield and drove themselves the hour and a half to my home at the lake. 

Personally, I think that’s kind of amazing. 

We ate lunch, talked, and looked at really old pictures for about three hours.  It was the best, watching and listening to my folks remember and try to remember the who, what, when and where of their young lives.

It was a great day.

My father is an engineer and worked for a large utility company making all that wonderful electricity we use.  I grew up in company homes adjacent to power plants in what we called the village.  Those homes are my memory of….home.  Those homes are all gone now.

They were removed a long time ago and I wanted to see pictures to see if my memory came even close to aligning with reality. I had asked my dad if he had any pictures of any of our old houses and he presented me with two boxes of photos in chronological order for the years 1950 to 1980. 

We looked at a lot of those pictures, mostly from the early 50’s, as in 1950’s, as in a long time ago.

I loved watching them remember, debate, and argue about who that was and where that happened only to finally agree it might not have been either of the people they thought.  It’s a gift to see them talk about who they were before they were my mother and father.  It’s a gift to see them as more than parents but real actual people with real actual histories.

My mother for instance, apparently had other boyfriends and went to dances and parties and all kinds of stuff.

Mom has fought macular degeneration for the last 20 years and is to the point she can’t see much anymore, even with a magnifying glass.  What’s bad is she was and is very visually oriented, she has curiosity and wants to see what that thing is in the back.  Her persistence in living and playing through all of that is just one of the amazing things about Bettye Lou.

BL was born a Yankee in Illinois but made it to Texas and she is now will always be a Texas girl. 

She (a BL quote, she has always been very quotable and I have a lot of my mother said stories, any way Mom would say, “My name is not she, use my real name.”) Mom, Bettye not she is, in the highly competitive world of Texas mothers, a top tier Mom. 

Never, not one time, have I ever felt not loved and valued.  Never, not one time, have I ever worried about my mother not accepting me.  And as hard as it is to believe when you see me today a calm cool dude there have been times in my life I have been decidedly unlovable and not very likeable.  I had sullen teenager down to an art.  But I knew my mother would never stop loving me.  That’s a remarkable thing to have in your corner when you are being unlovable.

This good woman used to go with her family of five in a small blue Mobil Scout travel trailer all over the Rockies.  Five of us, in a trailer or a car for two weeks.  Can you imagine the smells, the complaining, the arguing?  And that was just me.

Yet, somehow I remember those trips as fun and because I had the narrow vision of a child I don’t remember all of the work getting those trips together.  I just remember seeing every Indian dwelling in New Mexico and Colorado and seeing The Sound of Music somewhere in Colorado.

This is the woman who typed all my high school papers on her old manual typewriter.  She was my spell check and grammar check.  Imagine typing a research paper with footnotes on a manual typewriter in the middle of the night because the author procrastinated until the last minute. 

IBID baby.

Mom could and did get mad about this kind of stuff.  But I never, not once, worried about being loved.  In fact, that occasional anger, the irregular eruptions of emotions, taught me how to curse eloquently and gave me tools for my own marriage.  It’s okay to get mad and stomp and yell because love, a mother’s love, this mother’s love never, not once waned. 

My senior year in high school my father was transferred to Fort Worth.  My parents let me stay home In Colorado City to graduate.  It was a sacrifice for both.  My dad was awarded the most loyal fan for driving from Fort Worth to all the football games of a pretty bad football team.  My mother was at all those games, and all the baseball games and PTA meetings and plays and concerts and on and on and on. 

My mother was there.

She, Bettye Lou my mother, was there when I cried, when I had a post puberty case of the mumps, when I fell in love, when I got my heart broken, when I needed to suck it up, when I needed to learn to cook, when I learned how to iron, how to do laundry, how to live, how to understand others views, how to accept differences and most importantly how to love. 

I took that one to heart, my ironing pretty much sucks.

Mom is the one who says, from time to time, “We really need Marty here”, when something happens where Marty’s expertise or her brazenness or her intelligence would have been helpful.  It happens a lot.  My mother remembers my wife. It’s a small thing but those thoughts, her remembering Marty with love and admiration makes me happy and reminds me her love extends beyond the here and now.

Every now and then when I say something odd or a tad bit controversial (translate I talk like a democrat) Bettye will look at me and say, “Where did you come from?”.  She just can’t see how I got where I am.

That one  is easy.  I came from her.  I am my mother’s son. 

She taught me all the good stuff.  The stuff you need to know to love and be loved, she taught me to care and be concerned for others and most importantly she taught me that all of us, all of us are the same, we are just regular people.  She taught me the importance and value of basic fairness, she taught me not to be afraid of life, she taught me to love God, to never fear God. 

Truth is my mother taught me the best parts of who I am today.  And I kind of like who I am today.

Thanks Mom……and you know what, I will always love you, that’s what you taught me.