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.

   

REBA MAE—AN INTRODUCTION Part One

I’ve been an orphan since July 22^nd, 2003. I was going on fifty-three when it happened. I guess a lot of people wouldn’t call that being orphaned. But consider for a moment that many people are never prepared for losing their parents, no matter when it happens in life.

Reba Mae - 1941 - aged 18

I think sometimes for expats it can be particularly bad because you don’t get to see your parents often. In my case, once a year if I was lucky and a couple of times it was several years between reunions. Not only does that generate a lot of regrets, but it also means that you tend to freeze your loved ones in time. In your mind they never age. But then they do. And then they die.

I have friends my own age (which I’d rather not talk about) who still have one or both of their parents. If their parents are still well and happy, which some of them apparently are, I admit that I envy my friends that blessing. If mine were alive today, my father would be ninety-seven and my mother ninety-six. People actually live to be that age nowadays, some of them quite well.

My mother Reba Mae died the same year as my father Whitie did. They were both eighty. Reba Mae was the last to go. Whitie preceded her by six months. I can’t be sure, but I think that might have been a kind of pact they had. I mean, they had been together for sixty years. And from the time he was in his sixties, Whitie was always saying that he hoped he went before she did, because he “didn’t know what he’d do without her.”

Hearing that, a stranger might say, “Aw, isn’t that sweet?” But, believe me, that wasn’t the kind of romantic thing Whitie might say just to be sweet. He really didn’t have a romantic bone in his body. At least none where anyone could see it.  Example: One year for Christmas, he got her a lightweight aluminum snow shovel and put it under the tree with a red bow on it. To be fair, that same year he also got her a pretty tweed coat with a Russian black squirrel collar. But...you know.

Lennox School on the Hardin Pike 1933-34 - one of the one-room

 schools Reba Mae attended. That's her, the one with the banana

 curls just in front of and to the right of the teacher. She was 10.

 (Courtesy of WDN and the Linda Knerr Collection) 

Clearly, although Whitie did have a funny sense of humor, whenever his perennial depression let it shine through the clouds for a moment, the snow shovel wasn’t a prank. It was like, “Okay, what’s Reba been wanting? A new coat and, oh yeah, a lightweight snow shovel!”

When my sister Darla, who was about eleven or twelve at the time—and quite precocious—pointed out that a snow shovel for your wife was about the most thoughtless gift she could imagine, Whitie countered that he didn’t see why. She’d been wanting an aluminum one for years. He knew because he’d had to listen to her bitch about how damned heavy the coal shovel was when it was full of snow. So, he indicated, buying her the shovel she wanted seemed to him to show that he was thinking of her.

“Besides, don’t you think the coat I got her’s pretty snazzy?” he wanted to know, “I sure do. That’s a genuine Russian black squirrel collar on it too.”

So no, his talk of wanting to die before she did wasn’t a sweet nothing. It was pragmatic, practical, because when he said he “didn’t know what he’d do without her,” he actually meant that if she weren’t there to tell him where it was, he literally wouldn’t be able to find his ass with both hands.

I’ve written a lot about Whitie over the past few years since his death. Anyone who has read any of those musings knows that my relationship with my father was, to say the least, conflictive. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t love him. On the contrary, perhaps I loved him more than was good for me and struggled with his apparent lack of empathy for me and with never seeming to be able to achieve any perceptible level of approval from him.

Reba Mae, her older brother Gene and their little brother 

Kenny. Country kids.

His importance to me, nevertheless, should be clear from the fact that, although this is supposed to be a story about my mother, I’ve spent a not small part of the first paragraphs of it talking about my father. But that’s not an error. It’s a given, because the all-pervasiveness of his influence on my mother’s life, let alone mine, would be difficult to overstate.

Suffice it to say that his death—and his dying which drew out agonizingly over the course of several years—proved highly traumatic for me. Much more so than I could have imagined, since throughout much of his life and mine, I’d heard him talk a lot about wanting to die, and hearing his successive therapists opine that he was indeed suicidal when at the lowest levels of his half-century struggle with manic depression (or bi-polar disorder as it is described today).

Perhaps this was because his way of facing the inevitable demonstrated, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what I had always suspected. Even when his doctors claimed he was suicidal. Namely, that as a suicide, Whitie was a phony. That he didn’t survive long years of combat during World War II because he had a death wish. That when he came face to face with death, when it grabbed him by the throat and sought to choke the life out of him, he latched on and choked it right back, even though he knew it was futile, that he was hopelessly out-gunned. So it was that, when he was diagnosed with lung cancer, although they told him they figured he’d be dead in six months, he fought it for four years.

The symbiosis between my parents was palpable to me as a child. Not so much when I was small, but surely by the time I reached my pre-teen years. Despite being the good and loving parent that she was, no one had to tell me by that time that Whitie was Reba Mae’s favorite “child”. Although “favorite” is perhaps not the right term. He was the “child” who most required her help and who most fully absorbed her attention. To my siblings and to me, Reba Mae set the tone for our relationship with her by saying, “I’m not worried about you. I know you’ll always do the right thing and make the right choices, ones that’ll make you proud of yourselves and make your father and me proud of you too.”

Now, we all handled that crushing responsibility in our own way. It was probably toughest for Darla, because she worked hard at being the model daughter, the straight-A student, the best musician, the best she could be, in fact, in every extracurricular endeavor, a popular girl in school as well—a leader. She made it look so easy. But when we became adults she once admitted to me that it had been almost overwhelmingly hard.  

Our little brother Dennis James (or Jim as we called him at home) seemed to have the healthiest attitude. It was like, “Great! It’s all up to me so I’ll do whatever I want.” And boy, did he ever! He literally did it his way practically from the time he was a very little boy. And yet, a lot of the erroneous choices he made, and that lonely feeling of performing on the high-wire without a net, haunted him and caused him great suffering later in life.

For my part, I just mostly muddled through in every respect except my music and my writing. Those were areas where I was in my element, if badgered by self-doubt all the same. Because I took my mother’s demand for commitment and self-governance dead seriously, I was doing that high-wire act from the outset, and always with the nagging feeling that I was screwing it up. That I would, ultimately, fall from grace, and let everybody down. Those self-doubts and constant misgivings turned me into a fiercely independent and often secretive and taciturn teen—a stage when one of my favorite pop songs was Simon and Garfunkel’s “I Am a Rock (I am an island)”. If I was screwing up, I was doing it in private and without asking for help from anybody.

This was the exact opposite of how I had been as a little boy, when I drove my mother nuts with my worrying about every little thing and constantly asking her if I was making a mistake, being bad, endangering my health, sinning, and so on. She had trouble recognizing me as a teenager. And although I’d driven her to distraction as a worry-wart kid, she wouldn’t have minded having that kid back again, I’m sure, from the time I was thirteen or so.  

The month of May always brings back Reba Mae to me more than any other time of the year. First there’s Mother’s Day, and then, a few days later, on the sixteenth, her birthday. It’s a time when I try to remember her out of context, as if she were nothing to me. In other words, without seeing her in the reflection of my own passions and biases.

Reba Mae (right) with her parents (left)

and siblings, Gene (rear), Ken and Marilyn

Although I’ve always been a storyteller, I think my mother’s death was the first time that, in a flash, I could see a person’s life from start to finish, and realize that each individual’s time on earth is just that—a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. In between, there might be rising action, climax and denouement before the inevitable end. Or there might be an anthology of short stories, a sort of life storybook, with a series of beginnings and endings, comings and goings before the last page is written and read. Or in some cases, a life will seemingly flat-line from beginning to end and barely make a ripple. But in those cases, I always suspect there is some underlying secret that no one else will ever know, but that piques, like nothing else, the curiosity of writer types like myself.

Reba Mae was a very internal person. Her younger sister Marilyn once described that as a trait of the Weber side of the family. What she actually said was, “We Webers are all a bunch of tight-lipped krauts.” But in Reba Mae’s case, I could sometimes see a glimmer of her rich inner world, into which she never intentionally let anyone, and especially not Whitie. That was where she lived in the quiet moments. It was her survival mode. Since although she sought to keep it simple on the surface, she was a highly cerebral woman.

Given half a chance, Reba Mae could have been just about anything she wanted to be. She was intelligent, creative, curious and witty. She was also beautiful, a real knockout when she was young. But she was also almost pathologically shy in her younger years, and under-confident throughout most of her life.

Reba Mae's maternal and paternal families: 

(Left rear) paternal grandparents Salome (Leninger) 

and John Weber, followed by her maternal grandfather 

Job Cavinder, and by her father Vern Weber. 

(Middle row left to right) Maternal grandmother 

Mary Landis Cavinder, holding Reba,and Reba's mother's 

sisters, Edith, Flossie and Ruth. Kneeling, her mother's 

brothers, Jesse and Ivan, who is holding

Reba's brother Gene. 

Because she was so beautiful and intelligent, her shyness was often mistaken for haughtiness. Nobody could understand why such a gorgeous and very apparently smart woman would have anything to be under-confident about. So when she lowered her head and walked by somebody like she hadn’t noticed them, some people took offense and described her as “stuck up”. It wasn’t until they got to know her a little that they realized her reluctance to engage was all about not knowing why anybody would be interested in talking to her, so best not to make them feel obliged to say hello if they didn’t want to.

Reba Mae's father, Vern Weber

Reba Mae was the daughter of a tenant farmer. My grandfather, Vern Weber, was the son of immigrants. His parents were Germans from the Alsace Lorraine. My mother would sometimes reflect that it made her sad to think of her grandmother, because the only thing she could remember was that her Grandma Weber was an unhappy woman who never smiled.

They had a small farm of their own near the village of Glynwood in west central Ohio. When Grandpa Vern first married my grandmother, Myrtle Cavinder, who herself grew up on a farm near Jackson Center, he built them a bungalow on his father’s property, figuring he would one day inherit the farm. Instead, when his parents died, according to my mother, the farm went to a couple of old bachelor uncles. It caused bad blood in the family and apparently had something to do with Grandpa Vern’s sister, to whom he didn’t speak for twenty years or more.

Long story short, my grandfather ended up working as a tenant farmer within the farmland empire of another German immigrant, Charles Herbst. He worked three different farms for Herbst in Shelby and Auglaize Counties before eventually moving to the Auglaize County seat, Wapakoneta, my home town, once my mother and her older brother Eugene reached high school age.

Egg money helped make ends meet.

So, Reba Mae spent her childhood in the countryside. She grew up during the Depression, so times were tough. But thanks to the fact that they lived on farms, her family always had enough to eat. And between the thirty dollars a month that Herbst paid for living expenses, the money my grandmother made selling eggs and a small share of the crop harvest and dairy production, as well as my grandfather’s skill as a small-game hunter, they managed to make ends meet.

But until her family moved to town, Reba Mae never lived in a house with electricity or running water. She attended the one-room schoolhouse nearest to whichever farm they were living on and did her homework by the light of a coal-oil lamp. School was always at least a mile away and she either walked it or rode her Shetland pony. The homes she lived in always had an outhouse, a hand pump in the kitchen sink and a woodstove for cooking and heating. The one modern convenience was always a telephone, a wall-type device that featured a crank-operated ringer box with a fixed mouthpiece and a detachable cone-shaped audio handset.

That life instilled my mother with an inherent love of animals and nature in direct conflict with a distaste for any and all things “rustic”. Although she deigned to live in a cabin at the Buckeye Rustic Resort on Lake Manistee in Michigan for a week’s vacation once a year, that was the limit of her stomach for life in the wild. While she was frugal and unassuming as an adult, she wanted every comfort and modern convenience money could buy...including a lightweight aluminum snow shovel.

(To be continued)