Golden Light. Earth and Stone.

Easter, 2020.

Planet Earth is trembling in front of me. I had plans, and this ugly mess has gotten in the way. My mind is fuzzy. I have all this time; there is nowhere to go. I want to read; my comprehension is off. I should find new shows to watch; I revisit old favorites. I should be addressing pressing matters, but when I dig deeper to identify them, all I come up with is do nothing.

I am lucky beyond measure. I’m insanely in love with my wife and we’ve been given the gift of an incredibly wonderful and loving son. I have a family who’s inclusiveness and boundless love is a constant comfort. So I’ll stop my complaining, put the events of the world aside, and get on with it. 

I’ve written this. It has been billowing inside me since the beginning of February. And if I hold onto it any longer I feel like it would be a disservice to Mom. Easter was a special day for her, and the time seems right.

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A moment of insight. That’s what I’ve been waiting for, but it hasn’t arrived. So today I’ll give myself a break and say that insight isn’t insight at all. It’s just the term we give to other people’s observations.

The best writers say, when you’re stuck, write through it. So that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll abandon my search for the right words—a difficult chore for someone who’s great joy is expressing himself by arranging words on a page in a certain order—and I will plow on. Insight is out the window. Observations it will be.

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Nags Head, North Carolina

At the beach, on those long family vacations, my mother’s personal wants were minuscule: Breakfast at Sam & Omie’s. Spending an hour or two every afternoon basking in that southern sea air, either on the deck or on the beach—just as long as she could see the ocean. Settling in on the sofa long after dinner, her feet tucked beneath her, reading and talking as the cacophony of her large family dispersed and dissolved into silence, while just outside the purples and blues of the North Carolina sky melted into inky blackness over the Atlantic.

Mom’s great joy on vacation was making the house a home for all of us. Family meals. Grocery shopping. Even tidying up. Her ability to provide these simple things—to be Mom and do all she could so we would have the best vacation possible—was all that she wanted.

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Breakfast

I’ve had a lot of Saturday morning breakfasts with Mom. Country Kitchen. Mike’s. Puffin’s. The previously-mentioned Sam & Omie’s. So many others. The common denominator at each and every one of these restaurants was that whenever Mom walked into the place, she was royalty. It was as if a spotlight of goodness shined upon her as she walked to her table. To the staff, she was their Number One Customer. To other patrons, she was the treasured Queen of Hellertown. To us, our family, she was the loving Benefactor.

Mom never wanted breakfast to end. But after an hour of the news of the world and the news of the family had stretched to an hour-and-a-half, we’d begin to fidget, and that we-better-get-going body language would kick in. Finally Mom would say, “You all get going, I know you’ve got things to do.”

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The Christmas Open House

Mom’s preparations for the annual Christmas Open House began well before Thanksgiving. Picking a date, getting invitations printed, decorating the house, preparing the food—these tasks were all encompassing at 102 Cedar Road, and they snowballed into an intense conclusion on a Saturday night in mid-December.

For two of those years, I printed the Open House invitations after Mom voiced her “disappointment” in the previous year’s print quality. (I was going to say “displeasure,” but it’s difficult to visualize Mom being that disparaging about the work of Jack Parker’s Print Shop on Main Street.) It was 1990-something, and I just purchased a fancy-shmancy laser printer, so I raised my hand to print them. I figured, how hard could it be? I’d scan Lynn’s artwork, add a couple lines of text, and use a few fonts that Jack Parker didn’t have. 

It was way more work than I thought.

When I finally finished, and handed the final invitations over to Mom (much later than she had hoped to receive them, I’m sure) she said they were glorious—that they never looked better. “David, you’re so talented. All of you kids are.” (Mom could heap praise upon us like no one else.) Honestly, Jack Parker’s printing was better than mine … but that’s Mom.

I want to raise my hand and volunteer for invitation printing duty all over again.

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The Christmas Open House, Part 2

(I must shift to the present tense, because it doesn’t seem correct to write it any other way.)

At the end of the night, after the last guest has moseyed out into the December cold, the family gathers in the living room. (When Dad was still with us, even he, the staunch early-to-bed man, would be there, hanging in for as long has he could, until the sandman would capture him, and he would stand and bid us goodnight with a weary, “I’m bushed.”) We recount the evening, bask in its success, and open gifts that guests had brought: bottles of wine Mom would never drink; candies she’d never eat; candles and trinkets for which she had no room. Mom has everything and everyone she wants sitting around her, what is she to do with a vanilla-scented Yankee Candle? Gifts are passed out and given away, over jokes and coffee and leftovers—love warming the room like no fireplace could.

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As deeply as these observations are burned into my being, there is so much more. So allow me to be sentimental, and let me romanticize—just as all of us lucky to have wonderful parents would do:

My siblings are artists, musicians, writers; storytellers of all sorts. Throughout my life, I believed there was a clear-cut delineation on whether those talents were passed on to us from mom or dad.

Music? That came from Mom. She was the singer. As a kid I remember her solos at church filling that huge sanctuary, as well as the hearts and souls of every person sitting in it. Mom would sing when doing work around the house … notes as clear and pure as a single ring of a perfect bell. Then one day she decided she couldn’t sing like she once did, and she just stopped. Too soon, I thought. And still do.

But everything else? That was Dad. He could draw incredibly detailed architectural drawings, and had a sharp eye for design—knowing what went where on a page or in a photograph. Dad could write and edit and communicate in powerful ways that connected with both scholars and lay people. 

Then I read a very old letter my mom had written shortly after going to the Democratic Presidential Convention in July of 1948. She would have been 25 at the time and her account of that event was one of perceptive innocence—bursting with optimism, excitement, and empathy; hope and insight. 

Much later in her life, Mom began to write about her childhood—about life in her hometown in Virginia, growing up in a house on a dirt road, near the edge of the Elizabeth River, fed by the waters of the Chesapeake Bay. On the very first page, she described the day she was born, retelling and recreating the story through her sister Helen’s eyes:

I didn’t know from nothin’. Mama never told us anything about babies and when Bud [Mom’s oldest brother] and I asked, she told us that they floated up the creek on a log—and we believed her! Bud and I used to sit on the landing dock and wait for the tide to come in, hoping to see the log that had floated five more babies to our house. Mama was pregnant so often that I guess I just didn’t notice.

She called her story “Up the Lane.” Her tales of childhood and beyond—the sense of place, the characters—swept me away. It was a bracing revelation: My father was not the only great writer in their marriage. 

I lived so much of my life unaware of the person my mother was, and the skills she possessed.

I wasn’t around during those years when Mom looked like she could have been a 1940s movie star. She was thirty-four years old when she had me, and it was a long time before I, late bloomer that I am, noticed that she was a living, breathing, human being—not just a mom. I remember one moment, specifically: All of the family was together in Hellertown, watching Dad’s old slides—sitting in that darkened room, all of us making jokes about how with each new image we’d jump back and forth from decade to decade, and how if Dad was here he’d say, “Someone’s been messing with my slides,” and how ridiculous we all looked back in the old days. (The 1970s? Yikes.)

And then … click … the next slide advanced.

There, in the darkness, bathed in the reflected golden glory of a Kodachrome transparency projected onto a silver screen, was Mom. Stunningly gorgeous. Beauty queen. USO singer. In the room, there was a collective gasp, followed by stunned seconds of silence.

What other path could this beautiful, talented woman have taken? What did she give up for me and my brothers and sister? 

Her young life is the stuff of movies, captured in her tales “Up the Lane” in Cradock, Virginia. She grew up during the Great Depression, the youngest of six, living in that house on a dirt road, protected and watched over by her bawdy, larger-than-life siblings—siblings who may have suspected that their youngest sister had something different; something special. The land where she lived as a child was claimed by the government so they could expand the US Navy Yard—and she went to work in that same Navy Yard as a telephone operator during World War II. She sang like an angel, joined the USO as a balladeer, performing on war ships for sailors to hoots and hollers and beating hearts. Yeah, I’d watch that movie.

Which prompts me to ask the question again: At that point in my mother’s life, what if she had taken a different journey? What might have been her alternate reality?

Lucky for me, there was something she wanted over all of that: to be a mom.

My mother held a lofty position in her family, reserved only for her. When she would travel “back home,” my aunts and uncles and cousins in Virginia would surround her like a visiting dignitary. Dinners would be arranged, parties thrown, relatives would clamor for a chance to just sit and chat with “Aunt Ella.” 

It was the same here in Pennsylvania. It was as if she walked on a slightly higher plane; her feet just above the ground. It was a stature she never wanted, but that was undeniable. It came to rest upon her naturally. And that’s the way it was to the very end. 

Ella Beedle was the inevitable, quiet, center of loving attention in any setting. Walking into a restaurant for breakfast, standing on the deck of a beach cottage, surrounded by all of us as she sat in her favorite chair at the end of a long Christmas day, soloing on “Once in Royal David’s City” in church, or singing Irving Berlin’s “Always” for enraptured sailors on a warship in the Norfolk Navy Yard. 

In my mother’s time here on this planet, she was an unmatched vessel of loving, compassionate, musical, ethereal beauty … living in a messy world of noise and earth and stone.

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** If you doubt my take on my mom’s writing ability, then read her own account of her first USO show. My brother Jonathan, thank god, asked her to write about it.