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 – THE TEMPEST – Part Three

There were numerous times when I was a kid that I remember my mother, Reba Mae, demonstrating her deathly fear of electrical storms. I think the reason that this trait stands out in my memory is that, although shy, she never seemed afraid of much of anything. I mean, other than bad weather and driving through the rough South End of nearby Lima, Ohio (where she worked, oddly enough, through much of World War II).

She taught me that I had to stand up to bullies, and throughout the long years in which my father, Whitie, lived through pendulum swings between energetic euphoria and crippling depression, whenever he suffered a decline, she always stepped into the fray and ran his business for him—often for months—until he could get back onto his feet and do it himself. And she always did it with a smile and to the very best of her ability, even if, in private, I sometimes saw her cry.

But storms scared her silly. There was no rationale that would convince her otherwise. When the wind was up, the lightning flashing and the thunder rolling, she panicked.

When I was older, Reba Mae told me that her irrational fear of storms came from a childhood incident and that she was glad she hadn’t passed the phobia on to my sister, brother and me. Indeed, when there were tornado warnings, back when we were teens and she would start pacing the house in the middle of the night, trying to wake up the rest of the family and get us to accompany her to the basement, my sister Darla and my brother Jim would tell her to leave them alone, and I would always mumble, “You go ahead, I’ll be down in a while.” Whitie would just keep on snoring. It was his learned response to everything from fire and floods to riots and insurrection.

Anyway, it seems that when Reba Mae was a little girl growing up in the west-central Ohio countryside, she was out on her pony one humid summer’s day, when cooler air marshalled in a canicular storm of major proportions. She was out in the fields of the tenant spread that her father farmed in Shelby County. The storm came up so fast, with strong gusts of wind, thunder and lightning, and cold sheets of rain, that she had no time to make it back to the house. She could think of nothing better to do than to take shelter under a lone pin oak that stood in the middle of one of the fields.

Now, that pin oak, all by its lonesome in the midst of a field made it the perfect lightning rod, and although it had withstood thunderstorms of every intensity, season after season, for donkey’s years, it picked this particular day to attract a lightning bolt. The fire-bolt hit with incredible, explosive force and split the hardwood tree like some cosmic axe. The expansive force of the explosive blast stunned Reba Mae and her pony threw her and ran off to parts unknown. As soon as she could think straight, she picked herself up and ran for home. She arrived shaken, with ringing ears and soaked to the skin. From then on, it was as if every storm were out to get her. No one could tell her different.

Curiously enough, it was as if some poltergeist were following her around making sure that she was never able to shake that otherwise irrational belief. Indeed, three different TV sets of ours were struck by lightning over the years, until the advent of cable television made that a near impossibility. And the last time it happened, Reba Mae had rushed to unplug our set as soon as she heard the first clap of thunder, but despite that preventive action, the electrical charge followed the TV line in, jumped the breach and hit the plug on the floor before knocking out the apparatus.

I tried to explain to my mother that these things happened because Whitie was a stickler for TV reception and always got our town’s resident TV genius, Tom Cartmel, to install the tallest antenna towers available. The metal-frame towers provided excellent reception, but made our house a high-profile conductor just waiting for a chance to catch a bolt. It was years before Whitie figured out that if you were going to put up an antenna that tall, you needed to have it attached to a real lightning rod buried in the soil so that any lightning that struck would be grounded out instead of following the line into the house. But it was useless. To Reba Mae’s mind, storms were out to get her.    

There was one night in particular that I recall. I was about four at the time. Perhaps that’s why I remember it so well. Maybe because it was the first time I realized how unhinged she became when a storm broke. And that set my own fear aflame, even though when Whitie saw that I was scared of thunder, he had assured me that it was only the cooks in heaven rolling the potatoes around in the bin. It wasn’t until I was a pre-teen that I started going out, much to my mother’s displeasure, and intentionally walking around town in the worst of electrical storms in order to lose all fear of them. In the end, I got so that I actually liked them and found them singularly inspiring.

So on this particular late-summer Friday evening, it was about dusk when a big, loud thunderstorm rolled in, turning it pitch black outside. This was back when the Teddy Bear, a soda fountain and sandwich shop that Whitie and two of his brothers had founded right after the war, stayed open late on Fridays. Whitie wouldn’t get home until after midnight, once he’d finished the clean-up. If he was home, Reba Mae could handle her fear better, but when he wasn’t, it took complete possession of her. Like I say, I was around four and Darla around seven when this happened. We had a TV, one of the first in town, but our mother was afraid to turn it on with all the thunder and lightning. So she sat my sister and I (our little brother wasn’t born yet) down on either side of her on the couch and started reading stories to us from one of the beautifully bound and illustrated Childcraft books in the collection that occupied a shelf in a small bookcase at one end of the living room.

I usually loved it when Reba Mae read to us. She was an excellent reader, who made the stories come alive. But right now, all I could hear was the tension in her voice that had gone suddenly high and thin.  She was halfway through the telling of a story about a little dog with a bone crossing a bridge, seeing his reflection in the water and dropping his bone in the river to bark at what he thinks is another dog with his bone.

It wasn’t a story I particularly liked—I much preferred the one about the stork and the fox—because I always felt sorry for the little dog. I guess I identified because it sounded like something stupid that I might do. After that night, however, I would always identify it with frightening tempestuous weather. Little wonder, since right in the middle of the reading, there was an enormous clap of thunder with rolling aftershocks that shook the house to its foundations. And that was it for Reba Mae. She briskly snapped the book shut and in a voice that was tissue-thin and tremulous, said, “Come on, kids! Let’s go get Grandma and go have an ice cream!” And before you could say Rumpelstiltskin, we were in the car and on the way to Reba Mae’s mother’s house on the other side of town.

Reba Mae, Darla and Danny at Grandma Myrt's

When we arrived, Grandma Myrt was glad, as always, to see us, and, its being Friday, Grandpa Vern was off at the Monkey House playing cards. There was a brief powwow between mother and daughter, and then we were off to Max’s Dairy Bar for ice cream. Max’s, a tiny carry-out frozen custard store on the east side of town, was one of my favorite places on earth back then, which made me feel a whole lot better about the storm. Reba Mae too, evidently, since her fear was assuaged somewhat by being in the company of her mother and by virtue of the fact that Whitie had once told her that you couldn’t be struck by lightning in a car because the tires grounded it out.

Grandma Myrt and Grandpa Vern years later

Even after we finished our wonderful, sweet, soft ice cream treat in lighter than air wafer cones, the thunder was still rolling and fire-bolts splitting the night. So instead of going home, we went back to Grandma’s until time for Whitie to get off work. For Darla and me, it seemed like the middle of the night since it was well past our bedtime. We’d been rousted out in our summer shorts and t-shirts and with the rain the evening had grown cool. Eating ice cream had made us downright cold. Cold enough for our teeth to chatter.

Reba Mae told Grandma Myrt not to go to any trouble, but Grandma said it was no bother, and while she put water on to boil for coffee for them, she spread one of her wonderful patchwork quilts on the front room floor for Darla and me to lie down, and once we had, she covered us each with a warm, scratchy Indian blanket. With the voices of my mother and her mother chatting in the kitchen as background, I drifted into delicious sleep next to my big sister. Had I been able to articulate my thoughts into words back then, the word would have been...safe.    

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.