REBA MAE DAYS

Two days from now will be my mother, Reba Mae’s, one-hundredth birthday. I have no idea where she’ll be spending it, but clearly someplace where I can’t send her flowers and chocolates or take her out for lunch. Wherever it is, I hope, this Mother’s Day and birthday, that she’s footloose and fancy free, because her life here was anything but a walk in the park.

Reba Mae at sixty-nine

That said, she was always looking for a silver lining. But at the same time, there was nothing silly or naïve about her. She was quick with a smile and a funny line. She had a sharp wit and a great sense of humor, and she expressed that humor in her ever-mordant observations of the world around her.

She joyfully embraced middleclass life and availed herself and her home of every luxury the crocodile that inhabited Whitie’s hip pocket would tolerate. But she nevertheless had a lot of pleasant memories to share about her rural childhood, despite its unfolding against a background of subsistence-level tenant farming in the years of the Great Depression. Her childhood and early youth were spent on three successive tenant farms in Auglaize and Shelby Counties in Ohio.  None of them had electricity, indoor plumbing or running water except for a pump in the kitchen sink. But her family lived with a stubborn pride and dignity that formed part of her personality for life.

Although she never wanted anything more to do with farm living after she moved to town in her high school years, her upbringing left her with a deep love and understanding of nature which she passed on to me. She found solace in her plants and flowers and never ceased to find inexplicable beauty and wonder in the sunrise and sunset.

Reba Mae with older brother Gene and younger
brother Kenny, on the farm in the twenties.

Her life can best be described as one of hard work, sacrifice and worry. She started out waitressing as a teen on her own. During World War II, a nineteen-year-old newlywed left on her own while Whitie, my father, went off to war for nearly three years, she took a job in a nearby defense plant helping build tanks and amphibious vehicles. She remained there throughout the war and eventually became an inspector.

The early years following the war she spent as a busy homemaker with a growing family. Despite that, she worked part-time in the Teddy Bear Restaurant that Whitie and two of his brothers opened following the war. And once all three of her children reached school age, she also took a job working as part of the kitchen staff in the town’s school cafeterias.

As if that weren’t enough to keep her occupied, Whitie had the first of a series of nervous breakdowns that would occur repeatedly throughout his life when I was five, my sister going on eight and our little brother not yet one. That would be the start of decades of variously diagnosed bipolar and obsessive-compulsive disorders that he suffered, and that would wreak various and sundry collateral damages on the entire family. It would also mean that, during these many crises, in which Whitie was either too depressed to work or was hospitalized in search of treatment, Reba Mae would, first, take up the slack at the family restaurant while my father’s two brothers were still his partners. And then later, when they both went their separate ways, it would be Reba Mae who would step up and very effectively run the business whenever Whitie couldn’t. Whenever he was well enough, they ran the place together.

There were good times as well, of course—as with all manic depressives. Times when Whitie was flying high and had the intelligence, will and strength to whip the world. But those were never times one could count on as permanent or lasting. Reba Mae learned to take them when she could get them, but always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Modern pharmaceuticals eventually helped Whitie cope for longer periods of time. Often years at a time. The longest of which were the sixteen years he spent as a highly successful route salesman for a local cheese-maker. During those years, Reba Mae herself found considerable personal satisfaction in the two successive jobs she held as a highly capable office manager, first for an insurance broker and then for a law office.

But when Reba Mae and Whitie decided to retire, those years would bring new bouts of mental illness that, as any family who has experienced it knows, never affects the victim alone. There is always collateral damage.

I didn’t realize fully how all-pervading that illness had been for Reba Mae until Whitie lost a four-year battle with cancer in January of 2003, a couple months short of his eighty-first birthday. I spent some very high-quality time with Reba Mae after that and tried my best to convince her that her life was now completely hers and hers alone. She was free to travel, to move, to spend time with old friends and make new ones, to take up a new hobby or resume old ones. It was all about her now, after all this time.

She listened. She nodded. She even sometimes said, “I guess I can, can’t I?” But she clearly wasn’t convinced. At one point she turned to me and said, “The thing is, I’ve been with your dad—been him—for so long now, I can’t find me anymore! I just don’t know where Reba is!”

When I said good-bye to her at the end of that visit, I could see it in her eyes. She was saying good-bye permanently. That in-person visit would be our last. She would die a few months later, at age eighty, just six months after Whitie, in 2003.

One way or another, however, she’s with me every day. Her memory, I mean. I make no fantastic claim of my mother’s watching over me from heaven or any of that other nonsense. I truly hope that, if there’s anything beyond this, the dead go on to bigger and better things, schooled by their trials and tribulations in this life. I’d hate to think they stayed hanging around seeing what sort of mundane inanities we’re all up to.  I envision them flying off like a bat out of hell and never, ever, looking back.

As for my constant hope for Reba Mae, it is that, wherever and whomever she might be now, wherever the life-force she unleashed has ventured, the world she lives in is a happy one, one in which she’s all about being herself and getting the most out of every moment. I sometimes fantasize that she’s twenty now, as beautiful as she was at that age here, with her whole life lying ahead of her. And in that fantasy, the only thing she plans to hitch her wagon to is a star.

Happy Mother’s Day and happy birthday, Reba Mae. And may you be footloose and fancy free forever.