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Thinking of Mother's Day
By Jon Hoornstra
When I was a kid, there never was a shortage of sad news at our house. My dad was a minister and that meant that, at least once a week, there was an accident, illness or death in his parish. And that affected us.
So it was all the more remarkable that laughter came easily when mother was home. So much so that when we buried her in 1987, dad had her grave marker inscribed, "She was born with the gift of laughter," adapted from the opening line of Rafael Sabatini's novel, Scaramouche.
A typical example of laughter with mother came one afternoon in March 1960 when I got home from school. I found her laughing and giggling to herself as she stared out a window above the kitchen sink. Of course, I wanted to know what it was all about.
"Sorry, but I can't tell you," she replied with a laugh. Her face revealed an internal struggle. She had a great story to tell, an audience, but something was in the way.
"Oh, come on, what is it?"
She restrained her laughter long enough to explain that what she saw that day was sealed behind the oath of secrecy she took to become an official 1960 Census worker. That afternoon, she had visited the home of a reclusive old woman whose house was slowly choking behind weeds and overgrown shrubs. In spite of my best effort, mother revealed nothing and I settled for an amorphous promise that someday she might reveal what she saw.
Mother was named Elisabeth at birth in 1919, though nearly everyone knew her as Lisa. She grew up through the Depression years in relative comfort in a home beautifully set on a peninsula on Michigan's Grand Traverse Bay. Her mother, a graduate of the Chicago Conservatory of Music, filled their home with music and set mother on a path to becoming a fine musician. When she married my father in 1939, she could play the piano well. But she couldn't cook.
Most mothers of that era came with dads, like matched sets. To appreciate them, you had to know something about the fathers. My dad's beginnings were quite different. Born in 1920, he grew up in a small town along the St. Clair River near Detroit where Great Lakes shipping crews spent their winters. Unlike mother, dad knew the hunger and struggle of the Depression. They met at a college located, fittingly, midway between their two very different homes.
Mother learned to cook before my brother, sister and I were born. And she graduated from college a music major, able to teach voice and sight-read just about any piece of music at the piano or organ. She trained several church choirs from scratch and, if she found herself with more altos than sopranos, could easily transpose music into a friendlier key.
Mother could easily have used her intelligence and skills to build a career. But the few times she worked outside the house, she deliberately took minimum wage jobs to "punch the clock." Why? So she could be home when we kids left for school and home when we returned. You can't do that in most professions--not then, not today.
One day in 1986 I decided to remind mother of that 1960 "promise" and learn, I hoped, what had been so funny and secret. Now coping with emphysema, she had less than a year to live.
She leaned against the kitchen counter for support, thinking. Finally she looked at me and, talking through a smile, said, "I really can't remember."
It was the last time I saw her smile.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
