Vineta

I bet your mother didn’t play catch with you up until high school. I bet your mother didn’t shoot baskets with you throughout your childhood and was not a pushover in one-on-one. I bet your mother didn’t take you to the library for your religious education before taking you to a church. I bet your mother didn’t put aside change and small bills to buy a set of encyclopedias for you when you were in jurnior high school. I bet your mother didn’t offer you this advice on life: “We’re born naked, and someone will likely be wiping our bottom in old age. So we don’t put on airs.” But then again, your mother was not like mine. She died recently at age 99, but she is with me still in my memories, my character, and even my looks. In many ways I am definitely her son.

Her name is Vineta. She pronounced the second syllable with a long “e” sound, and almost everybody called her that, sometimes with a shake of the head at her outspokenness. When I was growing up I called her Ma, but over the years, I began calling her Vineta, too. I take after her in many ways. Although I have glimpses of my father when I look in the mirror, people often tell me that I resemble my mother more. I also share my mother’s social nature, an ease at interacting with people. To use a common expression from the Oklahoma of my childhood, she would talk to a stump, and I am the same.

Toward the end of her life, she was quite frail, suffered from dementia, and was almost totally deaf. My memories have become foreshortened with time, and it is hard to recall the strong, resilient, outspoken woman who raised me, the one who looks so young in the photos holding me as a baby. When I think about the past, I feel a pang of regret, not so much out of nostalgia, but because there is so much I wish I had asked her.

In her last years, every time we talked, she would remind me, “Tom, we’re growing old together.” And she liked to brag that she was “older than dirt.” Until the day she died of a massive stroke, her physical health was remarkable. She had a pacemaker, but she was taking only two medications and had regular medical appointments only every few months.

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Vineta was born in 1925 at her family’s farm in rural Oklahoma, the only child of a couple whose first spouses had died, leaving each with children six and eight years older than she. Her father was a farmer on poor hardscrabble land. He used horses and mules to farm and did not have a car until the late 30s. He was an alcoholic his entire adult life. She often talked about the toll his alcoholism had on the family—fights with her mom and others, coming home drunk from events, not showing up to meet her at the train or bus station when she came home to visit. As clerk of the school board in that rural area, among his responsibilities were school finances. Often she had to forge his signature or that of a co-signer on the teachers’ paychecks because he was too drunk to fulfill that duty.

On top of that, her mother suffered from severe mental illness. When my parents had been married only a few months, my grandfather divorced her mother and consequently, my grandmother tried to kill herself with rat poison. When she was released from the hospital, she lived for a period with my newlywed parents. It must have been hell. That was not all. My grandmother would look in neighbors’ windows or hide in a closet due to severe paranoia. Once she even brandished a butcher knife. Her behavior became so erratic that my mother, who was only 22 and pregnant with me, had to go to court along with her half-brother to have her institutionalized in the state mental hospital.

Although that upbringing left her scarred, my mom came out of it tough, wise, and with an open heart.

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She graduated from high school in 1943, one of a class of 13. She enrolled a few weeks later at the University of Oklahoma School of Nursing as part of the Cadet Nurses Program, a government effort to train nurses to fill a shortage due to WWII. The program offered free training, room, board, uniforms, and a license as a registered nurse on graduation. Her father and a friend of his dropped her off at the school on the way to take a couple of cattle to the stockyards in Oklahoma City. Her dorm was the first place she had ever lived with electricity, running water, and an indoor bathroom. Living there was the first time she had ever taken a shower.

After graduation as a nurse, she worked at Children’s Hospital in Oklahoma City, often in the communicable disease ward where she saw children suffering from horrific illnesses such as polio, meningitis, and encephalitis that have declined or disappeared with the advances in medicine in the past seven decades. She stopped working when my sister, was born three years after me. A few years ago, she was honored by the University of Oklahoma School of Nursing in a ceremony as likely the only living graduate from her class of seventy five years earlier. She thought the ceremony was just so much hoohaw about nothing special. When the dean asked her about her time in school and as a nurse, she replied only, “I was just doing what I needed to do.”

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She and my father, who was two years older than she, met in high school. They wed a year after he was discharged from the service. My parents were opposites in their personalities. My father connected with few people other than his parents, sisters, and us and had almost no friends, even among his coworkers. I don’t recall anyone other than family and my sister’s and my school friends ever coming inside our house, and the few others who did visit him came for a specific reason and never to socialize.

I remember only few times my father ever punished me or said anything harsh, but I don’t recall him ever playing catch with me. My mother, on the other hand, was the one who would engage with me in sports and games. She had been a basketball player in her country high school and had athletic ability into her 30s and beyond. More importantly, she was willing to play catch or shoot baskets, or to just horse around. We would often play a game when I was a kid where she and I would face each other, grab the other’s forearms, and try to circle and kick the other in the rear. When I was about eleven, I badly wanted a new baseball glove but didn’t have enough allowance money saved to buy a glove for me and also a present for her birthday, which was coming up. She asked me to get the glove as my gift for her on the condition that she would be allowed to borrow it when she wanted. Of course, she never did.

Her support was more than playing games with me, though. Her backing and encouragement laid the foundation for much of whatever success I have had in life. For example, I got my love of reading from her. She would take me to the library nearly every week. It was our time together. Even into her early 90s she would check a dozen or more books out of the county bookmobile that came every couple of weeks near to where she lived.

My mother told me only a few years ago that my father did not want to me to go to college but rather to get a job because he felt what was good enough for him was good enough for me. She wanted more than that for me, a better life that she and my father had. She encouraged me and supported the things I wanted to try. When I was in junior high school, she saved pocket change and scrimped to buy a set of encyclopedias, which I read voraciously and from which I still recall odd facts. For example, I used the mnemonic SAHCAHTOA for trig function identities when I took pre-calculus a couple of years ago.

She definitely was not one to spoil her kids, though, and despite my rose-tinted memories, I was not a momma’s boy. She was adamant in her belief that I had to do things myself, such as paying my own way through school. She was there to encourage me to try at whatever engaged me, though, to give me praise when I succeeded and comfort when I failed—and to always point out that neither success nor failure would last long so not to get carried away about either. The only rule I had growing up was, “Don’t do anything to disappoint us.”

Religious views for many people are shaped by their family. In my case, it was my mother who had a big influence on my thinking about religion. She identified herself as a Christian, not so much due to a belief about the divinity of Jesus but because protestant Christianity was the common faith in her rural Oklahoma upbringing and remains a dominant current in the culture there today. Although she was a believer of sorts, my mom was always quick to disparage oily sanctimoniousness which she saw as all too common among church-goers. She had little use for religious hypocrites, her evangelical kinfolk and in-laws, and Southern Baptists in general. Despite that, she had an ecumenical outlook, saying often that “the same God is in ever’ church.”

My family never attended church when I was younger, but when I was about twelve, my mother took my religious education in hand. First, we went to the library where she helped me find some books on religion. After I read the books and we talked about them, she took me to a Methodist church several miles away so I could attend Sunday school. My memory is that she sat in the car while I went in to class, but she claims that she went in to adult Sunday school sometimes, too. In any case we did not attend the main service. She later told me that she chose that particular church because she felt it was more religiously liberal and less judgmental than the evangelical churches with which she was familiar, and, more importantly, she was not likely to run into people she knew from the nearby Southern Baptist church. Later, when I was in high school, with her encouragement I began to explore other faiths on my own, attending services at churches of several denominations, protestant and Catholic, and even a synagogue, occasionally taking friends with me. Nothing stuck, though—every religious coat I have tried on has ripped across the shoulders, and I label myself a freethinker.

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Vineta was a real character. She was practical to her core—and frugal, the result I’m sure of her upbringing. She always wrapped presents in the comic pages of the paper. She put slivers of soap in a net bag so they could be used until they completely disintegrated. When a friend or relative died and she went to the traditional family gathering before the funeral, instead of food, she always took paper plates and napkins, eating utensils, and even toilet paper, justifying it by saying, “Those poor people are so distracted with ever’thing going on that they may not have thought to buy what they need. What if there is not enough?”

When my wife and I were back visiting from San Francisco one July, we were talking with her in the living room. As is typical of an Oklahoma summer day, it was hot and humid, similar to what I imagine a heat wave in Calcutta would be like. The only cooling in the room was a fan on a spindly stand, vaguely stirring the air. My wife, who didn’t really want to be there in the first place, looked as though she was being parboiled—or water boarded. As the conversation meandered between kinfolk and family ailments, I could see my wife glancing at her watch, obviously wondering how long before she and I could escape to our cool motel room. Suddenly, my mother said, “You know, as hot as it is, maybe I ought to turn on the air conditioner.” I could see the look of relief on my wife’s face as though she was thinking, “Oh, Sweet Jesus. Yes!!!” But then my mom said, “On second thought, though, it’s already 5:30 and will be cooling off soon.”

To say my mom was not particularly domestic is an understatement. I was visiting with her after my father died, and we were sitting at the 1960s-era, standard-issue chrome dinette set in the room off the kitchen that passed as the dining room. She captured her efforts at housekeeping when she looked over at the kitchen floor and said, “I need to either mop it or plow it.” Her kitchen counter reflected the same domestic nature. It was an interesting anthropological site covered with all sort of objects in an order known only to her, if at all. I am sure that twenty five years after I moved out of the house there were still things on that counter that remained from my time at home.

She was an indifferent cook as well, and our typical fare included meals like pinto beans and cornbread with fried potatoes or okra, or butter beans with sliced tomatoes and cucumbers in the summer. Or maybe a round steak cooked in tomato sauce. Because my mom had worked in a hospital as a nurse for several years she got used to the idea of having fish on Fridays despite the fact that we not only were not Catholic, almost certainly none of our acquaintances were either. We never had anything like cod or halibut or even local catfish. Instead we always had cheap frozen fish sticks. I can still smell them.

When it came to life, illness, and even death, she faced reality and the vagaries of fate straight on. About thirty years ago, she had a biopsy of a suspicious spot that had showed up in mammogram. She told me about the biopsy when I called on a Friday, saying that she would not know the results until the following week. When I asked her if she was worried, she said, “No, that is what the doctors are for, and I have other things to do in the meantime.” The test results turned out to be negative.

That same attitude played out over the course of my father’s final months when she often told him, “Pa, we’re going to make it through this.” By that, I’m sure she meant it just as she said it and not as a statement of false hope. He had been diagnosed with cancer five years before, and it had recurred and was deemed terminal. My mother called me early one evening to say that his doctor thought he was nearing the end. I caught a red eye to Oklahoma, arriving the next morning. By then he was already in a coma and died early that afternoon. Through his final hours, my mother talked with him continually. “Tom,” she said, “he may be unconscious, but he can hear us. I want him to know we are here with him.” After a few hours, his breathing became more difficult, and my mother calmly took me aside to explain that the breaths of a person close to death become irregular with increasingly long pauses until they stop completely. After my dad took his last breath, my mom and I sat quietly as the blood drained from the surface of his skin leaving it a lovely ivory color. Although, I know how sad she was, I never saw her cry, either then or at his funeral. I’m sure she did, but crying was a private act for her. It was the same when my sister, her only other child, died about twenty years later.

She was a tough woman, too. When she was 80, she had surgery to have a tumor removed from the adrenal gland on her right kidney and her gall bladder taken out as well. The surgery was on a Monday, and I planned to fly back to Oklahoma on Friday to take care of her when she came home from the hospital that day. On Wednesday evening, two days after the surgery, I called my niece to inquire how she was doing. My niece said she was doing just fine. I asked what my mom was being given for pain. Morphine? No. Demerol? No. Tylenol with codeine? No.
“What then?”
“She asked for a couple of aspirin to help her sleep tonight.”
She came home on Friday and insisted we go out on Saturday for her regular walk even if it was shorter.

She was always a person to speak her mind, and the rap sheet among kinfolk and in-laws was that she didn’t have much of a clutch between her brain and her mouth. I recall them often saying something like “Well, that’s just Vineta.” She told me once, “Tom, you wouldn’t believe the things that come out of my mouth.” My only response was, “Yeah, I would,” not just because I knew what she was like but because I am the same.

She had strong opinions and many colorful expressions:
• When I would brag about my daughters, she often remarked, “Ever’ crow thinks his is the blackest.”
• She was nobody’s fool: “Just because you’re old, people think you’re stupid. I may be old but I ain’t stupid.”
• “We may be poor, but we’re going to go clean.”
• “Give me a Yankee dime.” (a kiss)
• “That milk tastes blinky.” (begun to sour)
• “He doesn’t amount to anything. He’s not worth a fart in a whirlwind.”
• She used to say that the main reason her own kinfolk would hold a reunion is that “those people would put up with anyone for a free meal.”
• Of my father’s domineering eldest sister, “she had the gall of a government mule.”
• “As an old woman living alone, I have learned that if I need something done around my house, I have three choices. Do it myself. Pay someone to do it. Leave it undone. Ain’t nobody going to help me.”
• “That old woman I live with keeps hiding things from me.”
• She had strong opinions about her own memorial service. “If you decide to have one for me, and I don’t care whether you do or not, I want it to be quick and cheap.” As far as potential attendees, she said, “If they don’t come to see me when I’m alive, I don’t want them to come to my funeral.” My niece and I followed her wishes—of course.

She was smart, and her intelligence was alloyed with common sense. She flew only a handful of times, but she figured out how to deal with the stress of airports. Even though she walked a mile or more a day into her late-80s, she always requested a wheelchair due to her age. “That way, I don’t have to worry about finding my gate when I change flights.”

My mother believed in the importance of a positive outlook. “Tom, I’m going to have a good day ever’ day.” After my father retired, I think he suffered depression since my mother often commented on his dark moods and how he would spend his days watching television and complaining about the state of the world. After he died, she remarked that he “created a black hole and that allowed the cancer to come in.” She might have been partly right, but I think that five decades of heavy smoking was a more likely cause.

In the last few years, the Red Hat Society has emerged as an organization offering older women the opportunity to engage with each other and their communities. My mother was never a member of that highfalutin group, to use an adjective she commonly deployed, nor of any other organization oriented toward intentional socializing—other than the senior center (she especially liked to go on group trips to Indian casinos and to horse races). In her last two decades she had become an inveterate hat wearer—nothing fancy like an elegant red beret but rather variations of ball caps or even beanies, often festooned with pins and badges such as from the University of Oklahoma—the sort of headgear that used to make my daughters cringe a bit when they were out in public with her when they were in high school.

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We carry the imprints of our parents throughout life: in our genes, in our words, in our features, in our memories of them growing up—and, as I have learned, in our experiences with them in their old age. She was my teacher as I helped her through the final years of her life, giving me a glimpse of what my own path ahead might be like.

Whether we like it or not, our parents have forged us in many ways. Vineta had a big influence on me—not just traits like openness with people but also in my values, my attitude toward my own children, and more importantly, a basic understanding of life. She was curious and engaged and passed those gifts on to me. I am sure my political views and strong beliefs about the obligation that we each have to one another came from her.

Vineta’s life wasn’t easy, either as a child or in the roles of mother, housewife, and surrogate mother. She did her best, and I think it was plenty good.

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I wrote a memoir a few months ago about my father and some of the lessons he taught me, or tried to teach me. It is also on my blog, as “Fathers, cars, and life.” Here is the link: https://turn-stone.com/cars-my-old-man-and-life/