My Mother at 90

 
Lois Lucille McNair Van der Leun -- then and now

HER EARLIEST MEMORY is being held on the shoulders of her father, watching the men who lived through the First World War parade down the main street of Fargo, North Dakota. She would have been just four years old then. Now she's 90 years old and she comes to her birthday party wearing a chic black and white silk dress, shiny black shoes with three inch heels, and a six foot long purple boa. She's threatening to sing Kurt Weill's 'The Saga of Jenny" and dance on the table one more time.

She'll sing the Kurt Weill song, but we draw the line at her dancing on the table. Other than that, it is pretty much her night, and she gets to call the shots. Which is what you get when you reach 90 and are still managing to make it out to the tennis courts three to four times a week. "If it wasn't for my knees I'd still have a good backcourt game, but now I pretty much like to play up at the net."

She plays Bridge once or twice a week, winning often, and has been known to have a cocktail or two on occasion. She still drives even though it causes my brother to fret.

This is a good thing since he's the kind of man who sees the incipient disaster in everything and it's good for him to fret about something that has a smidgen of reality to it.

She keeps a two-bedroom apartment in a complex favored by college students from Chico State and, invariably, has a host of fans during any given semester. She's thought about moving to the "senior apartments" out by the mall, but "I'm just not sure I could downsize that much and everyone there is so old."

She was born deep in the heartland at the beginning of the Great War, the youngest of five children. She grew up and into the Roaring 20s, through the Great Depression, taught school at a one room school house at Lake of the Woods Minnesota, roamed west out to California in the Second World War and met the man she married.

They stayed married until he died some 30 years ago. Together they raised three boys into decent men. None of them came to any more grief than most, and had more happiness than many.

After her husband died at the end of a protracted illness, she was never really interested in another man. Instead she filled her life with family, close friends (some stretching back to childhood), and was, for 15 years, a housemother to college girls. She still works three mornings a week as a teacher and companion to young children at a local day-care and elementary school.

She has always been a small and lovely woman -- some would say beautiful. I know I would. An Episcopalian, she's been known to go to church, but isn't devoted to the practice, missing more Sundays than she attends. She's given to finding the best in people and letting the rest pass, but has been known to let fools pass at high speed.

Born towards the beginning of the 20th century, she now lives fully in the 21st. It is her 90th birthday party. It is attended by over 200 people from 2 to 97, many of whom are telling tales about her, some taller than others.

We don't believe the man who tells about the time in her early seventies that she danced on his bar. He's brought the pictures of the bar with her high-heel marks in it to prove the point.

Other stories are told, some serious, some funny, all loving. But they all can only go back so far since she has only been living in Chico, California for 30 years. I can go back further, and so, without planning to, I took my turn and told my story about her. It went something like this.

"Because I'm the eldest son, I can go back further in time. I can go back before Clinton, before Reagan, before Nixon, before Kennedy, before Eisenhower. Tonight, we'll go back to the time of Truman.

"It must be the summer of 1949 and she's taking my brother and I back home to her family in Fargo for the first time. I would be almost four and he'd be two and a half. The war's been over for some time and everyone is now back home and settled in. My father's family lost a son, but -- except for some wounds -- everyone else came out all right.

"We're living in Los Angeles and her home is Fargo, North Dakota, half a continent away. So we do what you did then. We took the train. Starting in Los Angeles we went north to San Francisco where we boarded the newest form of luxury land transportation available that year, the California Zephyr.

"Out from the bay and up over the Sierras and down across the wastes until we wove our way up the spine of the Rockies and down again to the vast land sea that stretched out east in a swath of corn and wheat that that I remember more than the pitched curves and plunging cliffs of the mountains. You sat in a plush chair at the top of the car and Earth from horizon to the zenith flowed past you.

"There was the smell of bread and cooking in the Pullman cars that I can still capture in my mind, and the lulling rhythm of the wheels over the rails that I can still hear singing me down into sleep.

"At some point we changed trains to go north into the Fargo Station and, as we pulled into Fargo in mid-morning, my mother's family met us with their usual humble dignity -- they brought a full brass band that worked its way down through the John Philip Sousa set list with severe dedication. They also brought me more family members than there were people living on our entire block in Los Angeles. There may also have been a couple of Barbershop Quartets to serenade us during the band breaks, but I'm not sure about that.

"My mother and brother and I were swept away in the maelstrom of aunts, uncles, cousins by the dozens, and assorted folks from the neighborhood on 8th Avenue South.

"The day rolled into a huge lunch at a vast dining room table where my grandmother ruled with an iron ladle. Then, after a suitable post-prandial stupor, my entire family rose as one and headed out to the nearby park for their favorite activity -- trying to crush each other in tennis. When this family hit the courts, it was like a tournament had come to town. Other would-be players just took one look and headed for another set of courts elsewhere.

"I was still too young to play, although my mother would have a racquet custom-made for me within the year, so instead I would have been exhausting myself at some playground or in one of the sandboxes under the eyes of my older cousins. Then, at dusk, I made my way back to the courts."

"In the Fargo summers the twilight lingers long and fades slowly, and as it fades into blue and darker blue the lights above the courts come up illuminating the players in a bright pool lapped by the gathering dark. In that twilight I sat, not quite four years old, about as old as she was when she watched the men come home from the Great War. I sat there on the cool grass just outside the chain link fence as the night grew dark around me and my mother and her family played on below.

"That summer evening is now more than fifty years gone but still, in my earliest memories, my mother and her brothers and sisters play on in that endless warm twilight. I see them sweeping back and forth in the fading light. Taunting and laughing together. Calling balls out that are clearly in. Arguing and laughing and playing on forever. Playing on long after the last light of day has fled across the horizon and the stars spread out high above the lights.

"Service. Return.

"Lob. Forehand.

"Volley. Backhand.

"Volley. Love All."

November, 2004 -- Chico & Laguna Beach, California

Posted by Vanderleun at May 10, 2006 8:31 PM