9. More About Mama

Here I am reminded, for no reason whatsoever, of my erstwhile advice to budding authors, to wit:

I have come to believe that the secret of good writing lies in the amount of revision a man is willing to do. Of course, one can revise and revise until a composition becomes so smooth and slick that it fails to make traction on other people’s imagination, but there is very little writing that cannot be improved by revision.

When I was a kid I was set at the task, occasionally, of running the churn—an old-fashioned up-and-down thing that required more labor for the amount of results achieved than any other machinery I ever tried to operate. At long last the butter would begin to show up around the keyhole and great globs of it would appear in the churn, and at that point—for some reason which I have forgotten—we poured in some lukewarm water.

The next phase of the operation required the pouring off of all the liquid, after which this loose, sloppy mess of butter was spread out on a board and we began to work some more water out of it with a wooden paddle. After I had paddled this butter until I felt it was about right for human consumption, my mama would take the paddle and contrive to squeeze out about a quart more of fluid—not because she was any stronger, physically, than I, but because she was more dextrous with the paddle and probably had a little more patience than I.

And to this day, when I am engaged in boiling down a page of narrative or dialogue for the sake of gaining strength through economy, I find the task somewhat on the order of the old butter-making experience. I highly recommend this to anyone first attempting literary labors.

The Spartan character of Mama’s habits was not reflected in her state of mind. She had a delightful sense of humor (as I have shown you), kept herself abreast of the news, and was always bright as a button. In her late eighties she frequently wrote a column of reminiscences for the Monroeville Breeze, recalling important events which had occurred so far back as the Civil War. She called this column “Under the Juniper Tree.”

One day when I was visiting my mother, I asked her how she liked a new preacher who had recently come to town. She said: “I like him, but I tell you it’s hard to sit there each Sunday and hear him preach that old-fogy stuff.” Which wasn’t so bad for an eighty-eight-year-old!

She took an interest in everything that was going on in the town; bragged about any new building, when it went up, as if she had built it herself; frequently wrote me about the beautiful landscaping and gay flower beds that the Catholics had made at their church, and wept when the Toonerville trolley line to Fort Wayne went out of business (not that she ever rode on it herself).

On a visit to her not long before her death, my mama was telling me a few things she would want attended to, and closed the conversation by saying:

“And be very sure, Lloyd, that the undertaker does not try to make me ‘pretty.’ I want my friends to see me as they knew me. I don’t want the same thing to happen to me that occurred on the death of my old friend in the country. She had never in her life had a permanent, or used rouge, or lipstick, for she had devoted all her time to work on the farm and the raising of a large family. But when her husband went to the undertaking parlor to see her for the last time, and gazed upon her changed features and hair-do, he said to the man in charge, ‘Les, who is this woman?’

My mother was an outspoken, independent, determined, cash-and-carry old lady, who lived to a great age and managed to keep her wits about her almost until the end, which occurred on a bright Easter morning when the church bells were summoning her neighbors to observe the day forever sacred to our faith in the Life Everlasting. She couldn’t have picked a more fitting moment for her departure; for she was a woman of sturdy confidence in our survival, firmly believing that “because He lives, we shall live also.”