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Margaret Ellen Berg, Née McHenry, my Momma In memoriam May 30 2015 |
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My momma loved Bobbi Gentry. And Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Frank Sinatra, Edie Gourmet, Julie London, Barbra Streisand. Music . . . My momma loved music . . .
The year was 1971, and it was a Saturday afternoon in Durango, Mexico, Dad off working or something. Mom packed me and Karl into the station wagon and hauled us to the then new-fangled Odyssey 2000 cinema plex to see a matinee. What she neglected to tell us was that we would be seeing On a Clear Day, You can See Forever, a recently released Hollywood musical. For a ten-year old boy, with Tarzan of the Apes playing down the street at the old-style movie house, it was a fate not too unlike being made to eat my peas. It’s one of those odd memories that for no particular reason sticks out clear in my mind, and I remember sitting through that movie wondering why I was made to be there. I remember gagging as Barbra Streisand belted out some song or another into a supposedly blue sky in New York City, of all places, and I looked up at my mom all annoyed to find myself struck by her transfixed gaze, her rapt face bathed in the glow of the silver screen asBabs sang her lungs out and Jack Nicholson smirked and mugged, no singing for him, no sirree, as he tried to turn his break-out role in Easy Rider into a Hollywood run as an up-and-coming leading man.
Three years later—I was thirteen by then—I sidled up to Mom, this time in the new town of Torreon—still Mexico—and told her plain: “Mom I wanna learn to play the guitar.”
“That’s great, son,” she beamed, clearly pleased. “Let’s start with the piano first and once you have that down, the guitar will come easy for you . . . “
My mother was born 25 days after the German Wehrmacht steamrolled its Polish border to gavel World War II officially into session. Seventy three years later, she reflected that among her life accomplishments she was perhaps most proud of the 54 years that she logged teaching. And she did it at the grade school, middle school, high school, and university levels, as well as religious classes later in life, as many of you in attendance today are surely well aware. She taught all the disciplines. Her certifications, I discovered, leafing through her files a few days ago, included Spanish, English, music, elementary school, social studies, geography, history, and even biology. I got my Mom as teacher for first grade; every kid should be so lucky. That was in Stewart, BC, Canada, and she did everything she could to teach me that old piano six years later. I was pretty set on the guitar and only made it through the kindergarten piano book before I rebelled and retreated to my room with her guitar and music books to do it on my own. Had there been a bit more teaching and learning across the planet and a bit less ignorance and national vanity, the awful terrible wars of the twentieth century might never have needed to even take place. Mom was not a political person and probably would never have looked at it like that. But I sure do, and I remember her getting up day in and day out to put her game face on every morning and march off to bring learning and opportunity to her students year after year, nudging so very many of us up the rungs of the long ladder that never ends, and she was still busy climbing it herself, right up till the very end.
It is surely impious and improper to say this here in this august and dignified setting. But I have to say it, to be honest and all: my mom was also smoking hot. She was graced with natural beauty and had the self-presence and pride to sustain that all her life. I don’t think it was necessarily hard for her to do so, but she took pride not only professionally in her preparation for her classes but also in her appearance, her figure, and her social presence. My momma didn’t hit any home runs in the game of love, bless her heart, but she did the math along the way to realize she’d been within striking distance a couple times along the way, including to a man I and my family love very dearly, a man sitting in attendance in this audience today, a man my Momma had lunch with the day she died, the last person she ever saw. Aubrey, all of us rued the day you and Mom broke up in the year 2000, and I for one was greatly pleased that she and you grew close again in recent years.
I remember my daddy crying at my hospital bed in Mexico and me realizing uncomfortably that he thought I was going to die. I didn’t think I was going to die, but I guess it looked pretty bad from the outside. I had a rare disease, and was in bad shape, lips black, bloody eyes, weeping sores all over my body and on the inside of my mouth. It came with high fever at no extra charge, and there was a lot of delirium. Anyway, I remember the hallucinations in the charter airplane to Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, leaning against Mom as she held me under her wing in the narrow back of the four-seat, single-engine plane. With my lips scabbed over and my throat seared from thirst, the best she could do to keep me hydrated was to keep a wetted wash cloth at my lips as the plane did loop the loops and flew through tunnels and under bridges and around clouds and to the very edge of space and even into the sun on that delirious plane ride to Victoria, Texas, where thunderstorms forced us down and then the ambulance to the hospital as lightning displaced the hallucinations and flashed in the night and thunder boomed all around us, pushing the vehicle this side and that on the highway, my only security in an alien and hostile new world the soothing presence of my mother, the touch of her hand on my arm. It took a month in the hospital and then another few weeks in convalescence, and about the time it looked like I was going to pull through and she could let her hair down a bit again, I looked up one day from my pillow, alert, hungry, and aching to get out of that hospital to find her at my bedside, looking out the window and singing along to a new song out on the radio, called Midnight at the Oasis. I learned that the singer’s name was Maria Muldaur, and there was some racy lyrics in it that I won’t repeat here, but the first time I heard it, it was with my Momma singing along. It was in late April, and the sky outside was cloudless and deeply blue, full of hope and promise, and in that moment my Momma WAS Maria Muldaur and her voice was a bridge between despair and hope, between pain and elation, the brilliant promise of a shining future dancing harmonically in perfect pitch all around that worn out hospital room.
My momma was no perfect manifestation of spirit in the flesh, no faultless paragon of virtue, and did not have the answers to all the questions. She had a few tough years, what some of you here today might call “years in the wilderness.” My momma counted as her greatest inspiration her own momma, my grandma Odell McHenry, but I think that inside my mom brewed an insurrection against a kind of refined and dutiful wifely perfection that was from another era and somehow outside of the zeitgeist of the eighties and nineties. She recalled recently as one of her fondest memories the first time she looked upon the gurgling smile on the face of her first grandchild, my then newborn son, Orpheus, also in attendance today. That would have been right about the time she first moved to Camden and began to find her way a bit in from the cold, wending a trail out of the wilderness and onto the plains of plenty in such abundance among you that along with metoday remember and memorialize my momma, mourning not her death but celebrating her life.
For it was here in this little town and among this fellowship that my Momma’s emergence from her little dose of wilderness grew into a garden of cautious satisfaction and then brimming happiness. She suffered terrible migraines in those troubling years in the woods but found in this parish and the community of believers and friends a liberation from those awful headaches and the multitude of medications her doctors prescribed to try to free her from an affliction a decade in the making. Mom has often recalled that Celebrate Recovery, an institution of this church, was instrumental in many ways to the life satisfaction that she harvested more with each passing year, a monumental step in the path out of her particular wilderness. From my own experience growing up I have always valued frequent travel; it’s all I knew growing up, and I smile at one of my mother’s stated regrets. If she could live her life over again, she reports, she would not spend 31 years of her life moving to a different town every year. It turns out that when she moved to Camden, she found the place that doing it all over again she would have likely settled on right up front.
I have never met most of the people in attendance at today’s service. But you were a vital part of my momma’s life and an inseparable part of the great happiness that marked the final fifteen years of her life. And for your community and fellowship that brought my momma such healing and satisfaction, I thank each of you from the bottom of my heart.
And to you, Mom, thanks for being there for me along every step of the way. Through your example, I expect to be able to find my way along the rest of life’s path, fortified and guided by your shining example.
