REBA MAE—A PORTRAIT Part Two

My mother, Reba Mae, was a stickler for truth. Of the many lessons she drilled into me from as far back as I can recall, the one most often repeated was that no matter what else you might lose in life, losing sight of the truth was the most grave. You were, she told me over and over, “only as good as your word.” And once you had lied and been caught at it, even if you never ever lied again, you would no longer possess your word or your good name as assets you could bank on. Once you broke your word, you no longer had it. It was no longer yours. You had surrendered it to falsehood and falsehood was what you would be known by from that point on.

Reba Mae with her grandmother, Mary

Landis Cavinder, her mother, Myrtle Cavinder

Weber and her little sister, Marilyn, around 

the start of World War II.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf was one of her favorite stories to tell me when I was small, because its moral was a simple truth in itself, namely, that lying had consequences. I’m not sure she was so insistent about the truth with my sister and brother. Maybe she realized how much I loved storytelling and was afraid that I’d develop a penchant for what Mark Twain called “telling stretchers”. My smart-assed little brother Jim once told someone, “If you don’t know something, ask Dan. Even if he doesn’t know the answer, he’ll come up with one that sounds really plausible.”

As an adult, I learned that we all lie in one way or another. The person who claims he or she “never lies” is lying even as they make that statement. We lie when we spare people’s feelings rather than being blunt. We lie when we tell someone that it’s been a pleasure to meet them even though it hasn’t. We lie when we tell someone how wonderful they look when they don’t. We lie when we claim to love a meal that, frankly, we’ve found it hard to swallow. We lie every time we preface a comment with “Let me be frank with you.” Or when we say we’ve had a wonderful time, when the truth is, we’ve been bored to tears. Or when we tell someone to “have a nice day” and don’t really mean it. We lie when we seek to convince someone we know is dying that they’re not. We lie to defuse awkward moments. We lie not to be mean. But mostly, we lie to avoid our own discomfort or embarrassment. And more often than not, we lie to ourselves as well.

Despite making this belated discovery, however, I still got what Reba Mae meant. She certainly didn’t mean that you should be blunt and cruel. She surely wasn’t. But she did mean that promises were sacred. That deliberately lying to save your skin was an unworthy act of cowardice. That lying to make it appear you had knowledge that you really didn’t possess eventually turned you into a fool and a laughing stock. That lying to cause harm to someone else was unforgivable. That lying habitually and perniciously meant that you were unworthy of the respect and trust of others and that you would eventually not know the difference between truth and falsehood. She meant that if your absolute word wasn’t your credo, then you had nothing, no matter how wealthy you might be, because you would have lost your most precious asset—your good name.

Once when my brother and I were both home at Mom and Dad’s house for a visit, while our parents were sitting in the living room watching TV, he and I were sitting at the kitchen table drinking beer—a lot of beer—and reminiscing about some of the crazy things we had done as kids.

At one point, Jim said, “Remember when we rigged up the water balloons over the neighbor’s garage door?”

“Oh wow,” I answered, “I’d forgotten about that completely!”

So we started remembering how it had come about. Typical boys of those times, we were always bosom buddies one day with the boys that lived on either side of us, and feuding with them the next. It was a kind of miniature Game of Thrones in which alliances and treachery played a predominate role, and added a quota of suspense and thrills to our quiet small-town lives.

Anyway, we’d been feuding for a while with one of the kids next door. No idea what it was about and by the next week it had been forgotten, but right then, it was war! We didn’t think of each other’s houses as belonging to our respective parents. The one on the left was Mike and Monty’s house. The one on the right was Joe and Greg’s. Across the field behind our place was the home of my cousins, Mike, Gary and Terry, a block away was my friend Mark’s, and so on. Our parents didn’t come into the equation.

So one day this neighbor kid comes over and soaps the windows of the bedroom my brother and I shared. And another day he lets the air out of my brother’s bike tires. We didn’t have to ask who did it. We knew. But we wanted our revenge to be perfect. A work of art.

So we hatched a plan, and one evening, when we saw the whole next-door family leave in their car, we put it into practice. We found a way to gently stuff a good dozen water balloons (cheap water-filled party balloons that broke if you looked at them hard) up under the neighbor’s rolling garage door. In our theory, it would be the kid who would be asked by his father to raise the door so the car could be driven in, at which time our foe of the moment would be bombarded by bursting water balloons.

But quickly hatched strategies full of baseless presumptions have a way of not working out as planned. It seems the whole family had been attending the viewing of a beloved family member who had just passed away. And for one reason or another, it was the boy’s father—who was wearing his best suit for the occasion—not the boy, who hopped out of the car and flung up the garage door. The engineering part of the plan worked beautifully, even if the victim turned out to be collateral damage. On raising the door, the kid’s father was drenched by the bursting of all twelve balloons.

The man was, obviously, incensed. He pumped his son about whom it could have been and the kid, of course, gave us up. The man came over the next day, still furious, before Whitie arrived home from work. He told Reba Mae he knew it was us and what all he would do to us if he ever caught us in his yard again. Reba Mae asked how he knew it was us and tried to tell him that she couldn’t believe that it was. So she and the man ended up having a yes-they-did-no-they-didn’t discussion that apparently got pretty heated.

When we came in, our mother said, “I want to talk to you two!” And by her tone we knew she meant business. She told us about her discussion with the neighbor man and she said she had better not find out we had anything to do with the caper because she had told the poor man that she was certain that it couldn’t have been us.

We were deeply embarrassed. But instead of fessing up, Jim and I simultaneously put on the most innocent of faces and swore we had no idea what she or the neighbor were talking about. How could she for a second doubt us?

“You’d better not be lying to me,” she said.

“Scout’s honor!” I said.

“Well, just in case, you guys had better stay away from that house for a while. I don’t want to see either of you in that yard, understand?”

We hoped that would be the end of it and that the whole thing would blow over quickly. But then Whitie got home.

Was it us, he demanded to know?

Again we denied knowing anything about it.

So now Whitie started getting hot under the collar. Who did that guy think he was coming over and accusing us without knowing what the hell he was talking about? And where did he get off arguing with Reba Mae about it?

“I’m going over and talk to him,” Whitie said, and Jim and I collectively thought, “Oh crap! Bad idea.” But we went about our business like we had nothing more to do with it, leaving any further discussion in the hands of the adults. It was the neighbor man’s word against ours and we’d made sure no one had seen us. This would be our secret and we’d take it to our grave.

Things escalated. Whitie started having the same yes-they-did-no-they-didn’t conversation with the neighbor that Reba Mae’d had, and when she heard the raised voices and heard Whitie shout, “Are you calling me a liar?” she murmured, “Uh-oh,” and was out the door, since Whitie was notorious for his hair-trigger temper. She had to step between the two men and convince Whitie to go back home, which was no mean feat, and then she again apologized to the neighbor man.

Now, sitting at the kitchen table, laughing about it with my brother, Jim said, “Man, I was so scared Dad would found out it had been us.”

“He’d have kicked the shit out of both of us for sure,” I said.

About the time Reba Mae found out we'd lied to her 30 years

before.

And then we both fell instantly silent because, out of nowhere, Reba Mae was suddenly standing beside us at the table. Now, Jim was in his mid-thirties at the time and I was near forty, but the look on her face had the same chilling effect on us that it would have when we were respectively five and ten.

“So it was you guys who did that!”  It was a statement, not a question. “I swore to that poor man that it hadn’t been you and your father almost got into a fistfight with him over it! You lied to me!

I got the feeling that if the neighbor were still alive, she would have grabbed us each by an ear and dragged us over to his house to apologize.

“Geez Mom,” Jim said, “it was almost thirty years ago!”

“I don’t care if it was three hundred years ago,” she said. “You both lied to me. Swore it wasn’t you. How do you think that makes me feel?”

“Mom,” I said, “give me a break. We were kids. It was a long time ago. And it’s not like we killed somebody or something. It was just a prank, for godsake.”

“I don’t care about that. What I care about is that you lied. You didn’t take responsibility for what you’d done. How do you ever expect me to trust you again?”

There was no convincing her. And we got the cold shoulder from her for a full day after that. Eventually she relented, but it was clear to us that while the incident might be forgotten, it would never be forgiven.

Lyman's, as it looked in the 1930s

Reba Mae was nothing if not a hard worker. It came naturally to her. Growing up on the farm she’d always had chores. She had gathered eggs, helped with the milking, helped her mother in the kitchen. When she graduated from high school she rented her own place, which she paid for waitressing at an iconic local eatery known as Lyman’s Restaurant.

Then, World War II broke out. She was dating Whitie when he was called up and they got married at the end of 1942, just before he was sent to the European Theater for the duration of the war. She wanted a better job, but I’m sure too that she wanted to do something to help the war effort. So she applied for and got a job at a defense plant that is known today as the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center and was known back then as the Lima Tank Depot. Their job at the time was to build tanks and landing craft for the Armed Forces.

Making sure "ducks" were unsinkable

Her credo was, “any job worth doing is worth doing well,” and she strived at whatever endeavor she was involved in to do just that. It wasn’t long before Tank Depot management took notice of this quality in her and made her an inspector. Her job was to make certain that all landing craft were properly sealed so that they wouldn’t sink like a bucket of lead when they hit the water. These were amphibious vehicles known back then as “ducks”. For Reba Mae, like for many other women who worked at the Tank Depot, knowing that their husbands and brothers and boyfriends would be the ones transported into combat in the vehicles they made was surely an added incentive to ensure top quality control.

After the war, when Whitie and two of his brothers opened a sandwich shop and soda fountain called the Teddy Bear, which was to become an emblematic Wapakoneta eatery, Reba Mae made use of her experience at Lyman’s Restaurant to lend a hand, both in food preparation and working the self-service counter. Later, when we kids were all school age and it was clear that a second income was necessary, she worked as a cook in the city school cafeterias, pretty much following the progress through school of my sister and me by working first at the Centennial Elementary School, then at Blume grade school and junior high, and, finally, in the cafeteria of the then-new Wapakoneta Senior High.

I never told her that it was nice to know my mother was just down the hall all day while I was in school. But it was. Even if, as I may have mentioned earlier, her strong sense of ethics never permitted her to treat any of her children with anything like deference over every other kid in school.

My father’s first nervous breakdown when I was five was foreboding of the kind of difficult times Reba Mae would have to face for the rest of her life. But for now, she could still take it in her stride. And even at the worst of times, she never lost her keen sense of humor.