Preface: Recently I’ve been working on some little tiles that have the title of this piece as a calligraphy quotation on them. It is something someone asked me awhile back to do in calligraphy as a custom order, and I quite liked the saying and have used it elsewhere in my art offerings. I was thinking about the quotation, and maybe doing a blog series here with stories/thoughts about people that fall into that category in my mind. Maybe during this holiday season I might complete a series: My Mother, My Father, My Uncle Bill, My Aunt Virginia, Henry Elfers, Janet Elfers.
The piece below will start with two (actually three) stories about my mother, and end with me pasting in the Facebook post I made today that prompted my reflections upon the stories!
When it comes to balancing checkbooks, working with practical figures and even doing my own taxes, I was introduced to this at a young age! My mother was well-known for her excessive attention to details, numbers and many other things. While certainly and inarguably, she had significant “abnormal issues,” the older I get and the longer since she passed in 2001, I find myself re-visiting my inner-head negative narrative about some of the things she did.
In fact, I find myself using many of the skills she taught me, and hopefully, for much healthier purposes and to accomplish tremendous things in my lifetime.
Sadly, I wish sometimes I could talk with her now, or not be so knee-jerk quick to categorize everything she did as “crazy.” She actually was an incredibly intelligent woman with numerous potential giftings that never materialized. And although some things she did gave the impression (or actually were) on the eccentric or even “ill” side, the truth is that I now find myself slowly remembering and re-understanding (at least some of these things) that I thought were so unusual when I was in my 20’s or 30’s.
She passed away when I was age thirty-seven. She was seventy-eight years old, and the third story here, especially, I begin to better identify with at my age!
Story Number One:
As I said, I was no dummy for writing checks/balancing checkbooks, etc. I vaguely recall even in grade school my mother trying to engage me in that activity with her. Crazy you say! (And then, I homeschooled my own kids and engaged them in their teen years–an amount–with how to keep records/balance things, etc even though they didn’t want to learn. It was called “math co-op” and “practical math” – ha ha).
In high school, I took minimal business classes, but I believe even in math class we had to learn how to write checks, etc. And of course, during my senior year spring semester in high school, I definitely knew enough to open her bills, write out checks, balance her checkbook, deposit her pension/social security, AND drive over to the Delaware State Hospital to have her review and sign the bill payments, so I could mail them off.
They only needed her signature, and believe me, it was an ordeal to have to sit with her in a mental hospital having her lengthily scrutinize every single one. I recall how shaky her signature was and how clouded her mind from the heavy psychiatric drugs, during that time. Lithium caused her normally large, flourished signature to become shaky and almost microscopic.
I have various stuff saved which I know right where I have it stored/categorized! Below is an example of how my mother wrote checks in 1975…to give an example of her thought process. I don’t believe I’ve ever written a check like this in my life, ha ha…although…occasionally I do add account details in the memo or at the top. My mother was correct to do that!
During my college days, I kept my own checkbook successfully and even filed my own taxes my senior year of college, without her assistance. In fact, at that time, it was a protest/assertion of my own authority and need to simplify the “ordeal” that providing her the information/signing things inevitably became…
So, here’s the story “Number 1!”
That was just the pre-story!
It was in the fall of 1985 and I had been married since June. Jim and I were living in a little apartment at 116 Haines Street in Newark, Delaware. It was the top floor of a little cape cod house that had the Community Services Corporation (a job-training/cleaning service) on the first floor. We shared the downstairs kitchen during the day with the employees, and after 5 pm and weekends we had it to ourselves, as well as some ability to use conference tables on the first floor.
Jim was still a full-time student at the U of D, and I was working full-time at Aletheia School with the Newark Church of Christ. Finances were tight. Somehow, I had discovered that our bank account was overdrawn with a number of overdraft fees. I couldn’t understand what happened nor find the mistake.
And, it put us in a terrible situation.
At that time–like many young couples perhaps–when things ran short we were borrowing/paying back my mother for groceries and such. (Believe me, she had a detailed running record and by sometime in 1987, as a result of some church-friends “marital counseling” we realized we needed to STOP this reliance on her in this way for a number of reasons, including the difficult detailed process of it all that prompted arguments in our marriage).
In retrospect, my mother was probably being wise. At the same time, we were also wise to let go of that particular reliance. We were married, and Jim needed to become more responsible as a financial provider, and I needed to not turn so quickly to my mother for help. When she loaned us money she wanted to know where every single dime went! And she also was charging us pro-rated finance charges (she was borrowing money, too) and it was simply an anxiety-producing interaction!
So, back to the story!
Maybe it will be anti-climatical.
Jim and I were overdrawn, and I had a whole bunch of paper bank statements spread out on the tables downstairs in that first floor business we rented from, trying to mark up and figure out what our “real balance” was.
I do know that Jim was confused/upset that we overdrew because he checked the balance at the old “George” machine on Main Street right after a deposit and it showed “plenty of money” and he made a withdraw.
Of course, I had been writing checks for bills and back then, especially, there was no “in real time” accurate balance that accounted for such delays in checks clearing.
Somehow, I was on the phone with my mother!
She drove herself over to the apartment and came in, wanting to have “every single bank statement/canceled check” put into her hand, ha ha, for gosh-knows how far back. Statements I had already dealt with.
I was twenty-two years old and miserable at the prospect of all this, yet, we were in a terrible situation! She would have been sixty-two years old in fall 1985.
WOW. Imagine THAT! (I will be sixty-two in May of 2025).
I remember it felt like hours went by…as she started at the beginning and had me call things out to her, while she closely examined everything and marked up the statements and my register, most likely. GHEESH, knowing her she probably brought a BRAND NEW CLEAN check book register with her, and started fresh!
Actually, it’s slowly visualized in my mind…now…maybe she had me make the entries. I “think” I had been on the phone with her first, and she actually showed up with extra clean new checkbook registers. (she had slews of them in her house as I recall!)
As as remember this scene, my first inclination is to laugh about it and think how annoying it must have felt…yet…I have a vague recollection that a part of me was glad she was there. Yes. I was thankful she was there, even if it all seemed overly complicated to me for whatever reason.
By the end of the night, she found every single mistake (while I was zoning out!) and I believe the bank would allow up to three refunds of overdraft fees. Possibly, she advised me to go in person and explain what happened and that it wouldn’t happen again, and perhaps we even had extra favor. I don’t recall.
What I DO recall was learning something about math, even at that age.
The reason I couldn’t find the “dollar amount” of the mistake between my register and the statements was that several times I recorded a deposit or a debit in the wrong column. My math was technically right, but applied to the wrong column. I think I had found some of those mistakes and crossed them out and re-calculated, however…it had to do with a “double” impact.
So if a withdraw was accidentally recorded as a deposit, it wasn’t enough to just take it back off the current total. You had to do that, PLUS record it as a separate debit! LOL. Of course! But, somehow I missed that.
Thank you mom, for teaching me this and taking your time with me that night. Maybe you were wearing that weird, fuzzy winter hat inside all night long while you did it…maybe your hygiene wasn’t too good and you were shaky and your dentures were clacking…I don’t recall. But, I thank you. Truly. All these years later…
Story Number 2:
In recent years, I’ve learned/concluded from my mother’s transcripts from just one semester at the University of West Virginia, that I have reason to believe she wanted to pursue a music degree in 1946, prior to her three siblings showing up on campus and withdrawing her without her consent and putting her is the local “lunatic asylum” possibly for no valid reason. (For more life-story telling, see older posts such as When Peculiar People Decide That You Are Acting Peculiar! , How I Fell in Love With My Mother, Carter Was Particularly “Violent” Toward Me , Meet One of My Mother’s Heartthrobs–The Dashing and Gossipy Mr. Walter Winchell )
All the years I knew my mother a lot of her peculiarities and excessive attention to details/record-keeping/numbers I assumed came from her being a legal secretary at one point and I would have assumed she took business classes in college.
(Above: My mother working at the duPont company in Wilmington, Delaware, sometime in the 1950’s)
My mother had multi-intelligences and capacities…I have poetry she wrote in high school (See My Mother Referenced ‘Confucius’ in Her High School Poetry Assignment , My Mother’s High School Poetry) and she was (like all the Lingers) a stickler for English/grammar.
I can remember when I would shout that I was “mad” at her as a child, she would correct me that “dogs go mad, people get angry.”
I once wrote a piece here rightfully marveling that she corrected my spelling of “torture” in a 4th grade school-assignment haiku that should have caught her attention in other ways at the time. ( See And You Decided Correcting the Word Torture Might Be A Good Thing ) Perhaps it did…and I was also “interrogated” why I should express such things…yet…all I have right now is the original copy of the poem showing her erasure and hand-writing!
My mother was good in math and was good in music. She played the piano, and initially taught me simple songs/note-reading at a very young age. I had a toy grand piano at first that had cardboard keys where it was just for “fun” and the white/black were together. One could possibly play something on it in the Key of C, of course. Later, I remember she got me a different toy piano (the body of it was black, and it was also a toy grand) that actually would have cost more in those days, that had separate black and white keys that could be played.
The following photo is me at the first piano. I can actually recall this thing, although I was only about three years old. Obviously, my mother posed me (she often did this, which I found “torturous” as a young child!) at this miniature grand piano with my wrists in correct playing position. I can actually almost remember this photo shoot.
When I was in 7th grade, I begged for us to get a real piano, and I recall getting a mustard-yellow-painted upright piano for $175 from the Wilmington Piano Company. My mother did teach me at that point to read complex music, and I have books where she made notations and guided me through the beginning stages of playing the piano.
One of the songs she played (she resumed playing some when we had that piano) was the Flower Song. It appealed to me, and she helped me learn it. I can still almost play it from memory…if I really try.
Another song she played a lot was the Midnight Fire Alarm. After she passed away, I saved amounts of her old music books which somehow she had kept from her young, college years, until that time in 1976 or so when we obtained a piano. They are old sheet music and books from the 1940’s with her name written upon the fronts.
Recently, I was looked through a Christmas Carol book I have, that has an inscription from her as a gift to me as a child in 1970. Many things my mother did were normal and actually beautiful, and I’m sorry that my other (very real) difficult experiences with her throughout my lifetime so tainted me. I think this phenomenon is not at all unusual.
We even see it today in our political discourse…we become so divided and polarized (or jaded, as they say) that we can not or will not acknowledge some things as being good or truthful due to our imbedded biases.
So, thank you Mom for teaching me piano. I have your piano here, and I am now teaching a young boy from my church on this piano. And, your grandchildren Zach and Jonathan both played on this piano. I wish I could resume attention to piano playing…you gave me the beginnings of such a great treasure. And this legacy can be passed along to others…perhaps even some day I will be able to teach Arlo and Zola, or, they will learn elsewhere and come here and play your piano. When I was young in my 20’s and 30’s and you would not agree for me to take the piano, I was angry at you. You kept saying “I’m not finished with it yet” and somehow I viewed it as “my piano” and felt you were selfish. I de-humanized you and could not imagine that you ever still played it…simply because when I was at your house, I didn’t see you playing it.
Now that I’m almost sixty-two, I think of you sometimes when I’m headed off to bed very late at night after working or watching TV and for some reason I decide to sit and play something at 2 am just before I turn the lights out for bed…it is not often of course…but I’ve had some good experiences on the piano in the middle of the night…or just for a few passing moments while my coffee brews.
I wish now I could have coffee with you and ask you to tell me about when you played the piano after I moved out…what songs you played…and what they made you think about. Maybe you would even tell me more of the story about what happened to you in 1946 when you were taking voice and piano lessons (according to your diaries) and trying to get a degree in music…just like several of your older siblings had…
(For more life-story telling, see older posts such as My Mother Was Not “Finished” With the Piano
Story Number 3:
The other day while driving, somehow I was thinking about lawncare and tools and things I own, and taking care of them…and outdoor work…and I got to thinking about my mother and her “lawnmower procedures!” and wondering to myself whether I had some equivalent tendencies, that my kids might now accuse me of.
Surely so! And maybe, years after I’m gone when they are older, perhaps they will be thinking/remembering things differently, with age…as I now am.
I think of a poem a friend’s father wrote about the “Continuum of Life” which has a profound line in it: “They’ll think the thoughts you’re thinking now…“
In Harmony Hills, my mother and father’s house never had a lot of grass to cut, per se…it was a typical neighborhood subdivision and I could do the whole thing in 45-60 minutes, possibly less.
Maybe what “pissed me off” about this at the time (I’m sorry for the language, but sometimes, it is needed in writing for the proper effect), was that every time I cut my mother’s lawn after my dad died and beyond, I thought of him. After his first heart attack in 1976, I took over grass cutting. I couldn’t bear to see him do heavy outdoor work, and it filled me with fear.
Of course, my father was slow to allow/teach me to use/start a manual gas powered lawnmower and emphasized to “never walk and pull it backwards” as I could slip and fall and “chop up my feet.” And of course, “never cut the lawn in bare feet!”
I’m sure my response to my mother’s lawnmower procedures also had to do with her having never done much at all in the house or outside in the yard. My father worked, cooked, cleaned, cared for me…and did all outdoor work, too.
My mother sometimes insisted my father do bizarre things in the yard like cut down beautiful shrubbery she believed kids were “hiding in” to harass her. Or, to install oddly-placed plants or concrete markers to serve as “boundary” markers for neighbors. The more ill and paranoid my mother became, the more terrible and eccentric our yard looked. There were even “No Trespassing” signs at one point, and she photographed me and my friends in front of them for evidence…
In my college days and actually into my 30’s, there were times I came regularly (or later, Jim helped) to cut my mother’s grass. Sometimes she was paying people in the neighborhood, and other times I either did it but honestly, quite often, she paid me to do it and I accepted. There were times we were struggling so much financially, that the extra $10 seemed to help somehow. My mother offered, and in retrospect, she was worried for us and in her own way trying to help, as well as get her yard cut.
My son Zach says he remembers coming along and that “Grandmom always gave us orange sherbet popsicles.” Those were a thing my mom did even amidst her mental illness when I was growing up…she would give me and my friends orange sherbet popsicles.
I don’t recall my mother ever cutting grass. At one point she bought an electric mower with a cord, which I found to be quite a nuisance. But usually, she had a gas mower.
So, here were the “odd” procedures, ha ha! The things I could care less about at the time and thought were ridiculous. I felt she micro-managed…I mean…I had remote anger in me…I’d been cutting that lawn since 7th grade and I didn’t recall my dad doing these things (at least not in front of me while I waited!).
- My mother was obsessed about making sure the lawnmower had enough oil in it.
- She also was worried rain would mix with the gas and oil.
So, she put a table of some sort in the back yard, and had a big canvas thing (some people might have used a tarp…) that she put over the mower, and stored the mower under the table. And then, she had a whole bunch of bricks she would use as weights all around the canvas thing…so it didn’t blow off…and rain get into the gas and “ruin her new lawnmower!”
I would stand there impatiently as she escorted me out back and have me remove the seemingly eccentric cover system. (I was also mad because she had two brand new sheds out back to store yard sale stuff…they were packed…she was a true hoarder!)
I was mad (OK…dogs go mad…so…I was ANGRY! grrrr%%%%) that she had this contraption for her lawnmower, and impatient that I had to help her move the bricks and put them where I wouldn’t accidentally mow over them!
Then, she had to locate the lawnmower oil and check its level. And then, the gas. She was also particular how I poured gas into the lawnmower…she had me use a funnel so I wouldn’t splash any on the outside of the engine. Imagine that.
I mean, probably at some point I saw what she was doing and insisted “I can handle this.” And maybe I did…I don’t know. I hated checking the oil…I mean…why do that? It’s probably “just fine!”
But sometimes…even on those hot summer/fall/spring days all the way up through 2001…there was a part of me that felt so much as I re-traced the oh-so-familiar lawnmowing patterns I had established years before...and went all around that little, familiar yard and free-associated with my memories…I knew every little part of that yard…I remembered so many things…
I guess the moral of this story is, now that I’m sixty-one years old, and concerned about finances and preserving the life-expectancy/performance of many things I own, I realize I should have been more patient and respectful toward her. What’s another ten minutes in the grand scheme of things, perhaps? The bottom line was the mower belonged to my mother, as did the property. It was right for me to give her help–regardless of whether she paid me or not. If her mower needed unnecessary repair/replacement, the consequences were hers, not mine. Not everything she did was “crazy” or unnecessary…perhaps she had her peculiar way of doing things (as we ALL do in so much…) and now that I have grown children and am much older…I think back on this situation, as just one…
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