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Personal Statement #4 My Mom:
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October 1, 2008
Mother... what intelligent and piercing eyes you have... British historian, Kenneth Clark, in his Civilisation instructs us that "great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last." True for nations, also true for individuals, this principle now presents itself to me as I look at a very small example of Mom's artistry. I am noticing the caption to Mom and Dad's wedding photo - these two, for someone else's benefit, even on the first day of their marriage, are already cast in the roles of "Daddy & Mummy," as she speaks to an unnamed party, the hidden focus of her words; and I now see the studied artistry of her fine penmanship, the best penmanship of her life, indicating the high importance, to her, of this historical artifact, one to be passed on, to me. I've had these photos of Mom since childhood, but as I see them anew, posted here, another small shard of family history emerges. See the photo labeled "Your Mother," but also, "Love Helen." It's suddenly clear to me that Mom gave this youngish-girl photo to Dad before they married; later, it found its way to my photo album, partially reprocessed - again, for my benefit. And it strikes me just now that these throw-away little details of my mother's life serve as microcosm of lives dedicated to others, the many hidden and behind-the-scenes efforts parents expend for their children - most of which remain entirely unknown, unsung, and unappreciated.
How Can You Keep 'em Down On The Farm, Once They've Seen The Farm! Johnny Carson once made that wise-crack. Well, it was hard to keep 'em down on the farm in the early 1950s, and for good reason. Life was difficult, the work never ended, and money was scarce - prosperity would come some years later, but in the meantime Mom was bearing up under a very heavy workload as a young farmer's wife. The challenges of her daily duties were exacerbated by a lack of what, today, would be considered very common luxuries - and the absence of these created almost a third-world level of existence. The old, large farmhouse had no running water, no bathtub, no indoor toilets, no climate-controlled indoor living. During our brutal North Dakota winters, attempting to counter the effect of uninsulated walls, Dad sealed off access to much of the house, the second-level and most of the first floor, with living quarters reduced to two rooms, the kitchen and adjoining dining room, now converted into a makeshift bedroom. This sleeping room was crammed with an odd assortment of essential winter-survival household furniture and goods. I still remember as a toddler, in my crib, when Mom and Dad were not around, climbing up over the bars and out of my bed, onto the adjacent tightly-juxtaposed dresser, and from there hopping to the next fort. It was great fun, let me tell you. And I thought everyone lived this way: "It’s wintertime again, time for Daddy to hang blankets over the doorway to the living room, and we’ll all live in one room again." What could be sweeter?
The Dairy Princess & The True Test of Love
During the early years, in addition to her many household duties, Mom, in effect, was in charge of our dairy operation. Dad, of course, milked cows very often, too, but, when practicable, he would be planting or harvesting crops, or making hay while the proverbial sun shone. So, Mom was the default resident dairy person, on-duty twice a day, every day of the whole year. Have you ever milked a cow? By hand? It is very hard on the hands, shoulders, and back. How about 20 cows? Every day! twice a day! This is no position of sinecure - we’re talking about real work here, my friends. To agree to become a farmer’s wife in those days was a serious commitment to arduous labor; which means it was a serious commitment to another person - you had to think twice, and three times, before agreeing to marry into all of this and becoming someone’s "dairy princess." But some cheated at this game. I remember my parents visiting another farm couple one evening. The conversation turned to the subject of their own dairy operation, and I was about to be introduced to a concept previously foreign to me. This farmer’s wife did not help her husband with any farm work, including the milking: "Because I didn’t marry him to milk cows!" came the almost-defiant retort. I was quite young at the time, but I remember thinking, begging the question, "So, exactly why did you marry him - he’s out there all alone, doing all that work alone - don’t you care about him?" I perceived that she did not. And it was in that moment that I gained a clearer sense of the meaning of marital devotion as displayed by my mother in reference to her husband. Mom, frankly, hated milking - a reasonable reaction, I think, to being beaten-up by hard work every day; but she did it, for many years. Look again at the fine-featured young girl above. If physiognomy reveals destiny, as some suggest, we note here that this girl was not designed for the hard-labor camps. But that's what she agreed to when she choose Dad. Is there a truer test of love?
Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road?
The answer is, to get away from me, of course - a ten-year old kid who harbored a perverse enjoyment for throwing rocks at chickens. I just loved doing so in those days; and, anyway, who could resist those little white moving targets running around the barnyard? Mom didn’t like any of this, to be sure, but I was addicted, and she would discover ample evidence of my frequent misdemeanors every autumn when it came time to butcher chickens; the black-and-blue marks revealing themselves upon the feathery denuding. It was all a big project. She would process over 100 chickens for our family’s needs; plus, she would do some for others, as well. I should say something about “cleaning chickens,” as they referred to it then. I did not like this job, and was thankful that I could work in the fields on those days. I never liked cutting off the head of a chicken - they probably didn't much care for it, either - but, I have to admit, after the decapitation, it could make for a funny sight, if only in a macabre sort of way. Here you would have these white-suited chickens, spraying crimson streams of blood, sometimes several of them at a time, running around the yard – without heads! This struck me as a surreal scene out of a Warner-Brothers cartoon. I mention all of this only to illustrate the many duties that Mom had in those day. There were so many of them. Another herculean task of hers – it seems somewhat unbelievable today, but she did it, I saw her – Mom would paint all of the farm buildings, all by herself! And she did this every four years! This was no mean feat – there was a big house, a big barn, plus all sorts of other buildings: graineries, chicken coops, hog barns and such. And some of these, like the main barn, were tall buildings. There’s Mom, using the tractor’s front-end loader as make-shift scaffolding, elevating herself to the high reaches of the barn, allowing her to paint in the rarified altitudes! These efforts were amazing to me then, more so now.
seeds of fate and destiny Here's something that my mother taught me when I was only 6 years old. Mom didn't really ask me if I wanted to do this... a wise managerial choice when dealing with a 6 year-old... you just sort of arrange things for him, offer an incentive, push him a little, and he's off. I don't really know why Mom did this, as it was something out of the norm of our usual activities. She must have seen an ad somewhere: Make Good Money Selling Garden Seeds ... how could it miss, the retail price was 15 cents, with a profit of a nickel for each one sold! The next thing I knew, Mom, my marketing manager, was instructing me on the nuances of sales psychology, and how to run this business: During your lunch hour, all you have to do is take this sack of garden seeds, walk around town, knock on some doors, and just ask people, Do you wanna buy any garden seeds? Well, this seemed harmless to me; besides, it would be a small adventure; and, I must not forget, I would earn 5 cents for every packet sold! big money! This small entrepreneural enterprise, one chiseled itself out of rock, from nothing, now 50 years ago, the effects of which remain with me. I can still see some of those faces that met me at their front doors. Most of them were very kindly; but mainly, very intrigued, and very amused, as they recognized "Helen's little boy," making his rounds, plying his wares. Many bought seeds from me that long-ago spring, were very kind to indulge the efforts of this little boy, who had climbed the steps of their front porch. I think I made 15 bucks or so... must have sold about 300 packets... more money than I knew what to do with in 1958.
But I spoke to Mom on the phone today and told her that I would add a paragraph to her article about this incident. She laughed and remembered this event. Now this is all very interesting to me. The subtitle of Mom's article is, Big Doors Swing On Small Hinges: Small Lessons From Mom That Changed My Life. My garden-seed experience would prove to be extremely valuable to me. I am a strange person; really, I hate business - yet, I have been self-employed for almost all of my life. I'm a money manager, but, one who is not so fond of thinking about money. I have used my businesses to finances my true interests in life; this web site, for instance. And some of the businesses that I've created came about by nothing more than a magnification of what I learned from Mom, my marketing manager, of that ancient time. Our family has managed a commercial window cleaning business for over 30 years; and I have secured many hundreds of commercial accounts by nothing more than marching into businesses, many thousands of them, unannounced, with the unmitigated chutzpah to simply ask, Do you wanna have your windows cleaned? ... just like Mom taught me. Studies have shown that the vast majority of small business owners grew up in families that did the same. It makes sense. There is a different array of skills needed to run a business than having a job somewhere. And these skills are best "caught" in the thick of actual business activity. Mom would help me more than she knew at the time. I explained some of it to her today, the long-term ripple effect, and she was surprised; even my own children were affected, as I made sure that they, too, had this experience. They have their own businesses today, as well. This little marketing skill, of which I have spoken, can create for you a good income, in just months of this kind of effort; but, it is unlikely that I would have known success here without Mom's persuasion.
Lessons Caught not Taught There was plenty of instruction then from Mom, and Dad, too - but not, let’s say, of a structured, formal didactic nature. There wouldn’t have been much time for that. In those early years, people were just trying to survive. But I learned many things from Mom, things “caught” along the way, sometimes with hardly but a few words spoken, sometimes no words at all, yet with far-reaching effect. The examples I will recount here will likely not be remembered by Mom as they were, for her, so fleeting in nature, so insignificant at the time. But many of these incidents are vivid in my mind. Here's an important one for me: I was 7 or 8 years old. There was some sort of a kids’ party going on in our house one evening. There seemed to have been no boys my age at the party, so I was at loose-ends. But there was this tiny girl-moppet, a pre-schooler, in the crowd; and, suddenly, she picks me out of the fray, comes over to me, and latches on to my arm. Well, I thought this was a little strange, but didn’t think too much about it, and chalked it up to what little kids do - not being one of them, of course. After a little while, the novelty of this adoration began to wear thin with me; but this little one would not go away and persisted in clinging to me. Here I am, sitting on the floor of the old farm kitchen. This tiny blond-haired parasite is still infecting me, camped beside me. Knowing that all good things come from above, I look skyward, to heaven, up there where Mom served as mistress of ceremonies of this confusion around me; and, without saying a word, I offer a telepathic prayer to her, conveyed by my entire visage:
“aaahhh, Maaaaaa, this girl won’t let me go, and I wanna go downstairs to throw a ball against the wall!”
And I remember my mother, with an inscrutable Mona-Lisa smile, shining down upon me. With a simple glance, without words, in an instant, via mystical methods possible only between a mother and her firstborn son, she answered my prayer:
“I understand how you feel. But I want you to allow that little girl to be with you right now. She needs you.” I exaggerate nothing here. It’s the way it was. The love of friendship, like the ways of God, moves in strange and metaphysical ways. There were certain issues in that tyke’s life – I shall not reveal them here, nor her identity, so as to embarrass her – issues that caused for her a sense of insecurity that evening; but Mom seemed to possess an awareness, and I’m sure that it was such intuitive prescience that prompted Mom’s request of me. A small example of service on Mom’s part, a lesson “caught” along the way, but of the kind that shapes the thinking of observing children.
There are many other stories, “one-word” lessons that I could talk about; such as, Mom’s dictum, “Don’t say can’t”! Mom, with this assertion, was merely affirming the advice of history's best thinkers:
Legendary These stories, like the photographs above, present a frozen instant-in-time, a brief snapshot of a world now gone. These still-frames, in a sense, can only distort the reality of how it truly was back then - because the stream of life is living, moving, multi-faceted, with so many pressures, joys, and issues impinging upon us at any given moment. And yet – is it not interesting and most instructive to us, as we look back upon our lives, and the lives of those whom we love, that the events which we desire to remember most, the events that were most meaningful to us, are, sometimes, those small acts of service, devotion, and charitable-mindedness. That close-knit farming community of the 1950s has now passed into history; but the good deeds of those days achieve immortality as they will always be remembered. My mother is a good person and, as you now know, in many ways, lived an heroic life. She and I, as many of our friends well know, have had our disagreements along the way; but that, too, is part of life, part of the dialectical interaction between people who are growing. While driving on Interstate 94 recently, crossing into North Dakota from Minnesota, I noticed a new welcoming sign referring to North Dakota as “Legendary.” To this I would only add the clarification that North Dakota itself is not legendary - but some of its people are. Well, my dear friends, I had the privilege of growing up among real pioneers, and the children of pioneers; and, trust me in this, they invented the word “Legendary” – look that word up in a dictionary and you'll see their pictures there. And my mother takes her rightful place among that pantheon.
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