And then they came for me

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me

Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984)

https://youtu.be/yd90kHp_jEs

Happy Mother's Day

When I was a child, I liked nothing better than to creep into the dark recesses of my parents’ closet, pull out the picture album, and pore over pictures of my mother when she was young. She was foreign, nearly exotic, in those already aging photographs with her permed 30’s style hair and wide, bright eyes.

I crouched over the dusty album, trying in vain to connect the beautiful young girl in the photographs to a mother who at that very moment was laboring over a hot stove, preparing a meal for her farmer husband and crowd of unruly children.

My favorite photograph, the one that held me captive with silent wonder, was of my mother in dark sweater and plaid skirt perched on a woodpile in an unknown and unfamiliar woods. How old was she? 17? 18? 20? What color was her sweater? Her skirt? What made her eyes flash so?

I had only known her as a cleaning woman, wash woman, cook, 24-hour guardian determined to make wayward children behave. I had seen her shucking corn from the garden, plucking feathers from freshly slaughtered chickens, painting the walls of the house, fashioning slipcovers or clothing on a treadle sewing machine when the children were abed and the only sound was the click of the machine and the call of frogs through the open window.

I had heard the creak of the floorboards as she went from bedroom to bedroom, tucking covers about children in fitful sleep; watched her figure and refigure the grocery list in a vain effort to stretch the money to buy all that was needed. I have felt her kiss me goodbye and hello and all the other times in between for no particular reason.

But I have never seen her perched on a woodpile in a forest in an unlikely sweater and skirt, flashing smile lighting carefree expression.

Other pictures in the album were just as impossible; my mother in in her 20s wearing winter coat and French beret; as a child spindly legged and thin, leaning into her mother’s aproned side; posing on the running board of a huge, ancient roadster beside the much loved sister who died young of appendicitis.

She was a stranger in that album, one that I longed to meet. She has been a stranger at other times in my life: when she sat staring into the crackling fire after learning that the mother she had leaned against in that long forgotten picture had terminal cancer; as she conversed in animated sign language with a deaf uncle; when she sat silent, undecipherable, listening to taped songs written and performed by her musician sons, both claimed by the same force that took her mother; and in more recent years sitting on the iron bench beside my father's grave in the family cemetery, staring into the distance.

Today, my mother’s black hair has turned to white, her face marked with more than nine decades of living. She is no longer the young girl in the picture album and I am glad. I no more prefer that beautiful stranger than I prefer an empty canvas to a rich and colorful masterpiece; or smooth bland marble to a carefully hewn sculpture. I yearned toward the young girl when I was a child and knew no better. I yearn now toward the woman, the mother, the grandmother, the great grandmother and great-great grandmother she has become.

The gate on my

grandmother's
farm

Down Yonder

My father begged to take piano lessons when he was a boy, but his mother refused. “Boys who play piano are sissies,” she said. Most everyone in rural Kentucky in the 1920s and ‘30s agreed. Piano-playing boys grew into men who cooked, helped with the housework and treated wives with deference. They were henpecked, tied to their wife’s apron strings . . . sissies.

Not long after marrying my mother in 1938, he purchased his first piano: a used upright, hauled it home and began to play. He played by ear, but as his right hand quickly tugged a melody from the ivory keys, his left hand moved enthusiastically across the lower notes, keeping time with the pedal-pumping work boot with little connection melodically to the tune being played. The result was unique, strangely appealing, like the compositions by modern composers I would hear at concert halls later in life.

The desire to play struck him at odd moments: when he returned from a day of plowing crops on his Farmall tractor, hoeing the garden; sawing and hammering  in his workshop. When the first notes echoed through the house, we children rushed to the piano and watched fascinated. He played Hank Williams mostly, some Glenn Miller, but always ended his impromptu recitals with “Down Yonder”. The song’s fast tempo excited the old upright:  it fairly bounced on the floor.

My father never went to college, and making a living for a wife and ten children severely limited his options. He farmed, then worked at the uranium plant: quit when he realized it was a dangerous place to work. He started his own business hauling sand up a nearly perpendicular hill to the barn where he washed it in a machine he had invented. He delivered the sand to golf courses for sand traps and to contractors for building projects. Handicapped by the lack of demand for pristine silica sand in rural Kentucky, he closed the business, and worked in maintenance at the local hospital until he retired. He later served four years as county judge.

Projects flourished on the perimeter of his working life. The family farm straddled the New Madrid fault. He studied firsthand accounts of the devastating earthquakes of 1811-1812 that told of oil spewing skyward from cracks that opened in the churning landscape. He studied the farm's geology, deciding where lakes of oil might be hiding, organized a company, sold shares and drilled (unsuccessfully) for oil. He was convinced that a correctly designed magnet motor could revolutionize the world, but died – from cancer that may or may not have been triggered by his days in the uranium plant - before construction began on the Hadron Collider: a network of superconducting magnets that stretches 17 miles underground near Geneva, Switzerland and which scientists predict will reveal the secrets of the universe.

Down Yonder is a fine expression, a lyrical and very southern way to describe where someone or something can be found. It reminds me of the parade of unwieldy musical instruments my father hauled home and coaxed into song. They were a bother, too large to fit well in any room, a pain to keep clean, nearly impossible to move, but I now recognize their presence for what it was: magical, necessary, a gateway to a soul’s expression of itself. 

I’ve owned a piano for 46 years, but try as I might, I have never been able to play “Down Yonder” quite as well as him.