(Unless otherwise noted, the Kathryn Tucker Windham blog is written by her children, Ben Windham and Dilcy Windham Hilley.) As Mother entered her nineties, she sometimes was asked about dying. Mother had no fear of dying. She called it “the next great adventure.” What she could not tolerate were all the euphemisms people used for death. “Why in the world would someone say they ‘lost’ somebody?” Mother would ask. “Why, that would just be careless! Why can’t people just say someone died?” She had other notions about death and dying. Speaking at a friend’s funeral, Mother said she believed that, when you die and you get your hearing before God, he doesn’t ask if you obeyed the commandments. He doesn’t ask if you led an exemplary life. He simply asks, “Did you have a good time?” What a marvelous way of looking at life and death.
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(Unless otherwise noted, the Kathryn Tucker Windham blog is written by her children, Ben Windham and Dilcy Windham Hilley.)
One sweltering July Sunday in Selma, Alabama, my mother wore mink to church. As a rule, the three young Windham children were vigilant about remembering our mother’s June birthday. But one year, we forgot. On other birthdays, we’d worked in secret, weaving potholders or making elaborate drawings of battle scenes. But this June 2, school was letting out, band camp was about to begin, and the city pool was open. And we forgot my mother’s birthday. Sometime in the early part of July, in a miraculous moment when my sister Kitti’s mind turned from boys in bathing suits to her family, she said to brother Ben and me, “Oh good Lord. We forgot Mother’s birthday!” Guilt-stricken, we gathered our savings together and set out on a Saturday morning to make things right. At Woolworth’s. After close inspection of Evening in Paris cologne and other exotic possibilities, Kitti selected the most perfect present in the universe---a pair of mink earrings. I guess they were real mink. The cardboard they were clipped to said MINK EARRINGS. We had just enough savings to purchase these high-end fluffs of elegance. We wrapped them and presented them to Mother that night, apologizing for the oversight a month earlier. Mother appeared delighted, saying she could hardly wait to wear them to church the next day. And she did. She wore her hair short, and those furry muffs must have grabbed the attention of more than one fashion-conscious woman in the congregation. I doubt Mother cared one whit. After Mother died and we were sorting through her house, I opened her top dresser drawer where she kept all things special. There, wrapped in a cotton handkerchief, were a pair of tattered, shedding mink earrings…worn to church one sweltering Sunday in Selma, Alabama. (Unless otherwise noted, the Kathryn Tucker Windham blogs are written by her children, Ben Windham and Dilcy Windham Hilley.)
Like all good Southerners, I have this story to tell you, and all you have to do is listen. You don’t need to judge me, and you don’t need to figure out an explanation for it. Last Sunday, I left my house to drive to the grocery store. I got in the car and pressed the radio button to listen to NPR. But instead of “This American Life,” which I expected to catch, I heard the sound effects of bats. Yes, bat wings beating. So I assumed I was listening to “Science Friday” instead, only it wasn’t Friday, and the bat wing sounds stopped and my mother’s voice came on the radio. Mother was talking about fall nights and Southern ghost stories, and I was a little rattled. I looked at the audio monitor, and it was blank. No station was registering. I decided my son Ben must have put a CD of his grandmother telling stories in the car player, so I hit eject. It was not my mother’s CD. It was Leonard Cohen. The earth stopped revolving, and I couldn’t breathe. Deeply puzzled by this time, I hit the audio control, and up came an ad on WJOX (which, I should add, I hurriedly switched to NPR). Some syndicated show was on my local station, and the earth began to revolve again. As I shopped for groceries, I was haunted---some would say literally---by what had happened. When I got home, I told my son about the experience. He tried to explain it away in technical terms, but nothing fit. Then he dared to ask me if I had been getting enough sleep! His car was in the shop, so he asked to use mine to run some errands. Within 20 seconds, he called me. “Mom!” He said. “Are you playing a trick on me?” Yes, the bat wings, his grandmother’s voice, the blank audio monitor…. (Unless otherwise noted, the Kathryn Tucker Windham blog is written by her children, Ben Windham and Dilcy Windham Hilley.) Though Mother was the author of several cookbooks, she never taught any of us to cook. She had her hands full as a widowed working mother raising three children, so there just wasn’t time. Like many of our mothers during that era of convenience cooking, my mother liked to use condensed mushroom soup to fancy up a recipe. Lowly chicken thighs---which, in my grandmother’s house, were politely called “second joints” ----were miraculously converted into fine cuisine with the simple addition of a can of mushroom soup. When I graduated from college, I needed to know how to cook something, anything, that was guest-worthy. Visiting Mother in Selma one weekend, I told her I needed a simple recipe that was failproof. She reached for her reporter’s notebook and wrote detailed instructions for Butterbean Casserole. My favorite part of the recipe, besides the fact that it’s in her handwriting, is the encouraging little note at the end. Maybe I’ll make some tonight…. (Unless otherwise noted, the Kathryn Tucker Windham blog is written by her children, Ben Windham and Dilcy Windham Hilley.)
Mother loved to collect Southern superstitions. She even wrote and illustrated a little book called Count Those Buzzards! Stamp Those Gray Mules! I think it’s now long out of print, but it was a great collection of superstitions from the South. Counting buzzards was one thing Mother believed in doing. An old regional rhyme says the number of buzzards you see can predict your future. It goes: One for sorrow Two for joy Three for a girl And four for a boy. Five for silver Six for gold Seven for secrets never been told… If Mother saw only one buzzard, I swear she would pull the car over to the side of the road until another buzzard appeared. Mother used to talk about the buzzard rhyme in her storytelling sessions. People were intrigued, and she often got correspondence from folks telling her about their buzzard-counting experiences. One of her favorite letters came from a woman in Tennessee who wrote: Dear Kathryn, Every time I see a buzzard, I think of you. (Unless otherwise noted, the Kathryn Tucker Windham blog is written by her children, Ben Windham and Dilcy Windham Hilley.) If we hadn’t messed with the climate, this would be just the right time of year to make cornbread. Cornbread goes with all the seasonal foods---chili, soup, stews, collard greens, butter, sorghum syrup and so on. I believe my mother made the best cornbread on the planet. She was adamant about the recipe too. Anyone who knew my mother knew her mantra was “no sugar in the cornbread.” Mother had a running controversy with another storyteller on the west coast who insisted on sugaring her cornbread. The woman would taunt my mother with articles and recipes that praised sweet cornbread. To every correspondence from her friend, Mother would write on the back of a postcard, simply, “If you want cake, make a cake. Love, Kathryn” Of course, Mother could whip up a batch of corn muffins without ever so much as glancing at a recipe. As she got older, I realized the best cornbread-maker in the universe might not be around forever, so I asked her to show me how to make it. And she did, while I watched and wrote down every step. I still have to pull out that recipe when I want to bake a skillet of cornbread. The paper is grease-stained and growing limp from age and use. I suppose it’ll eventually turn to paste, but maybe by that time, someone else will want to know how to make proper cornbread, and they will write it down. (Unless otherwise noted, the Kathryn Tucker Windham blogs are written by her children, Ben Windham and Dilcy Windham Hilley.) Kathryn’s first grandchild was not born until Kathryn was 70. David Wilson Windham came into the world as loved and eagerly-awaited as anyone could imagine. He was a precocious child, drinking in every detail around him and retaining more than most children his age. One thing David was fixated on from the time he could reach for it was a necklace his grandmother wore. It was a perfect likeness of the artist’s rendering of our house ghost, Jeffrey. I found it in a little silver shop along a bridge in Florence, Italy, in the early ‘70s and brought it back as a gift for Mother. She wore it nearly all the time. When Mother went from her Selma home to visit her new grandchild in Tuscaloosa, David would snuggle into her lap and play with the dangling Jeffrey charm. “Ghost,” my mother would say to him as he studied the piece. When David began to walk and talk, he would run to the door when his grandmother arrived and shout, “GHOST!” Thus, Mother became known as Ghost to David and later to her second grandson, Benjamin Douglas Hilley. Both boys adored Ghost. Like most grandmothers, she indulged them. Unlike most grandmothers, she also introduced them to pleasures such as picnics in the cemetery. One seasonal activity the boys enjoyed was picking up buckeyes in front of the law office of Mother’s attorney, Ralph Hobbs. Now Mother believed strongly in the power of buckeyes and often preached it during her storytelling sessions. Buckeyes, of course, are the brown nuts that emerge from the thick capsules that are the fruit of the buckeye tree. They’re smooth and generally about the size of large shooter marbles. Mother believed everyone should carry one for good luck. First, though, the owner must rub the buckeye on his nose to absorb oil from the skin. That way the buckeye knows to whom it belongs. She also told audiences that, if you carry a buckeye, you’ll never die drunk. Mother carried several buckeyes in her purse at all times and dispensed them---with instructions---to whomever she deemed worthy. When the crop came in, she and her grandsons would pick up dozens of the nuts for future handouts. Mother kept the supply in an old laundry bag in the trunk of her car. When my son, Ben, was old enough to recognize the makes of cars, he loved to point out the various types and colors. One day we were driving down the road, and he said, “Oh look, Mama! There’s a car just like Ghost’s!” He watched as it passed by us, and said, mostly to himself, “I wonder if it has a trunk full of bucknoses.” (Unless otherwise noted, the Kathryn Tucker Windham blog posts are written by her children, Ben Windham and Dilcy Windham Hilley.) My mother had many talents, but she never embraced the new era of technology. It’s not so much that she feared it; she just believed it detracted from the things in life that are more important. In her hallway on Royal Street, Mother had a black Bakelite telephone so heavy you could crack a skull with the receiver. I have fond memories of that phone which is now in my home though, sadly, no longer functional. I swapped secrets with my young friends on that phone. The thick straight cord stretched just far enough for me to sit on the floor of the closet and whisper girlie gossip without my older siblings prying. Later, it was on that phone that I summoned up enough courage to call the dreamy Keith King and ask him to the Sadie Hawkins dance. It was on that rotary dial telephone that Mother called NBC executives of the popular TV show, “That Was the Week that Was,” to scold them for satirizing goings-on in Selma. And on that phone, Mother would wearily take late night calls from an elected official who was “bad to drink” and liked to talk politics in the middle of the night. In the late 60s, Mother consented to a second house phone, a wall-hanging plastic rotary phone in the kitchen, but she didn’t much like it. The popularity of microwave ovens brought more opportunity to scorn technology. For all our growing up years, Mother put meals on the table three times a day unless, of course, we were in school, which saved her one cooking. They were not elaborate meals---I recall a lot of fish sticks, Kraft macaroni and cheese and big green salads---but she prepared them all and worked full time. In the 1980s when my sister, Kitti, got her first paying job, she thought it would be the very thing to buy Mother a microwave for Christmas. Mother oohed and aahed over the extravagance of the gift. Some weeks later, when I was home for a weekend visit, I asked Mother why the microwave was not in the kitchen. “It’s under Ben’s bed,” was all she said. Later, I took a look under my brother’s bed, and there was the microwave, boxed, with pieces of Christmas wrapping still attached. The next epoch in our quest to modernize my mother came with the advent of the answering machine. Now this was a gadget of technology we knew she would embrace. Mother was not fond of long phone conversations. Sometimes she didn’t want to answer the phone at all, and it rang a lot at our house. My brother and I searched until we found the simplest answering device available. One push of the button, and the caller went straight to the recording. We were practically giddy when we delivered the machine to Mother. “Look, Mama!” we said. “You’ll never have to answer another phone call!” Mother said she thought it was perfectly marvelous. We hooked the thing up to a phone jack, prodded her to record a greeting and left knowing she would fall in love with the new accessory. About a week later, I ran into a friend of Mother’s from Selma who had recently moved into my Birmingham neighborhood. She told me she’d been trying to reach Mother by phone for a couple of days with no success. “It just rings and rings,” she said. I knew Mother was out of town at a storytelling festival, but I was puzzled that her answering machine had not picked up. I tried calling her Selma number, and, just as her friend said, the phone just rang and rang. When she returned from the festival, I called Mother again. “Where is your answering machine?” I asked with more than a little frustration. “Dilcy, I don’t want to have to return all those phone calls,” Mother said. “I threw that thing in the ditch behind the house.” From that time forward, we never inflicted technology on our mother. No cell phones. No caller IDs. No computers. She wrote her books on an electric typewriter until her final years when she traded down to a pen and legal pad. She had more important things to do. (Unless otherwise noted, the Kathryn Tucker Windham blogs are written by her children, Ben Windham or Dilcy Windham Hilley.)
The word “genteel” may have come into the American vocabulary only after my grandmother was born. Helen Tabb Tucker was the essence of classic Southern ladyhood. Mother once told me that her mother refused to say anything derogatory against another person. The most blistering verbal criticism she ever heard her mother utter about someone was, “I do not admire him.” On some occasions, my grandmother’s soft charm could turn into childlike simplicity. Those rare occurrences stirred my grandfather’s impatience with his wife. As president of the local bank, it was not uncommon for him to bring impressive company to the house for dinner. Now dinner, as you well know if you knew my mother at all, was the noon meal of the day. The nighttime meal was supper. One day my grandfather brought to dinner a man who had studied life in the Antarctic Peninsula. He told the story of the harrowing journey of two explorers who lost their bearings and were rescued only shortly before losing their lives. In the course of the story, the man said, “For days, these poor explorers had to live on ice cakes.” “How perfectly awful,” my grandmother exclaimed. “Why, they must have nearly starved to death!” Of course, the visitor was referring to icebergs, not edible cakes of any sort. My grandfather glared at my grandmother in a fashion that told her it would be best to sit quietly for the remainder of the meal. Though my grandmother was widely respected for her purity of heart and spirit, when called upon to do so, she could make generous use of a zinger. My grandfather died when my mother was in school at Huntingdon College in Montgomery. After his death, my grandmother opened a small insurance agency to support the family. She had dozens of loyal clients in that town of Thomasville, Alabama, but she also had to deal with a wide-ranging public, something that can try anyone’s patience. One day when she was typing policies at her office, a scruffy, unkempt man came through the door and plopped down in the chair next to her. “May I help you, sir,” my grandmother said graciously. “Yeah, you can,” said the man, crossing his arms over his tobacco-stained shirt. “I need some insurance, and I figured since you was a Tucker and I was a Tucker, we could work out a deal.” My grandmother turned from her typewriter, lifted her chin, and said to the man, “Sir, the woods are full of Tuckers, and some of them are very common.” Zing. I don’t know that the man had enough sense to catch her drift, but the encounter became a favorite family story, one that we still love to tell today. (Unless otherwise noted, the Kathryn Tucker Windham blogs are written by her children, Ben Windham and Dilcy Windham Hilley.) It must have gotten tiresome. For all our growing up years, my mother slept on the sofa by the kitchen the night before Thanksgiving. That way she could get up periodically and “see to the turkey,” basting and such as needed doing. Sometime around 1990, Mother was taken by a brilliant notion. Sometime that September at a family get-together, she announced, “For Thanksgiving I have rented a beach house at Fort Morgan for the week. Anybody who wants to come down for any length of time is welcome to do so.” My brother and sister and I were surprised. What? No more gathering of the family at Mama’s long pine table? No more setting up card tables for the children and overflow guests who inevitably appeared? (For years those guests included the two young men sent to Selma by the Mormon Church that year in an always-bankrupt attempt to convert somebody. Anybody. “They look so thin and hungry riding those bicycles all over town,” was Mama’s explanation.) We were puzzled, caught off guard, but we recovered quickly. After all, it was the beach. It was a new adventure. It was still a family assemblage, and that’s what mattered. That very first year at the beach, everyone adapted quite well. A huge roomy house right there on the shores at Ft. Morgan was, after all, something to be really thankful for. And no turkey on earth could hold a candle to the pot of boiling shrimp---huge tasty Reds---that became our traditional Thanksgiving meal. In the early years of the new tradition, Mother would drive down from Selma with my sister Kitti on Monday to set up the house for other arrivals later in the week. The rest of us would go down as soon as possible, hoarding vacation days from work to stretch out the family time at a place that is near perfect in November. The summer tourists were gone, the autumn sky was Mediterranean blue and, no matter how cold, the Gulf insisted we wade in deeper and deeper until we were drenched by the waves. In 2005, my sister died just weeks before Thanksgiving. My mother, by then in her 80s, acknowledged her failing eyesight prevented the long drive alone to the beach. But her indomitable spirit insisted on continuing the tradition. “Kitti would want us to go.” That’s all she said. It was impossible to hurdle the absence of my sister, her gypsy spirit and laughter, her propensity for surprise---magically producing harmonicas, tambourines and kazoos for impromptu family performances. But every Thanksgiving until Mother’s death, our “adopted” family member, her next door neighbor, Charlie Lucas, would drive with her down on Monday to set up the house. My mother, deeply rooted in her Methodist upbringing, would call all in attendance to gather around the Thanksgiving table. We would hold hands. Mother would say a short and beautiful blessing and make her annual attempt to have each of us say a word of personal thanks. It would begin well. “I’m thankful for each family member and for our friends gathered here today,” I would say. “I give thanks for recovery from the illnesses this family has suffered,” my sister-in-law would say, her words of thanks precious, for there had been many. “Thank you, God, for these people who have taken me in to be part of their loving family,” was Charlie’s prayer. But, when it came his turn, the mood of the deeply touching sentiments would be dispelled by my wonderfully irreverent brother. “Roll Tide!” he’d say, and we’d all collapse into the great gift of laugher, and it was another Thanksgiving well spent. |
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