May 7: Happy Birthday!

Mama’s birthday was always remembered, looked forward to and never forgotten, always the most special birthday of my year. Selecting her gift was important to me even as a little boy with a dime or quarter to spend at McCrory’s five and ten cent store. She was easy to buy for, a thimble or a set of bobbins or pack of Singer sewing machine needles or scissors for her sewing drawer, a paring knife for the kitchen, or make her a box to put jewelry in and paint it with a child’s imagination.

We still come across some of those gifts from years ago, especially things I happily saved up for as a teenager. A covered silver-plated butter dish that I spotted in the window of a local jewelry store, probably Cogburn’s, and saved up for months and bought, and was very proud of because we were not used to having silver in the house, an unaffordable luxury. A silver-plated sugar bowl from the same jewelry store, that she used until she likely got tired of polishing it and put it on display in the glass breakfront. A set of kitchen knives carefully selected and bought from a CutCo salesman while I was away at university about 1955 and that we still use every day. The memory of all that is as special now as was the deciding and choosing and saving up and purchasing and wrapping in gift paper with an awkwardly tied unmatching ribbon and giving, and watching her open and be delighted. The happy memory returns every time I use one of those things even today.

In the years after leaving home, going away to university and through my Navy years and later, it was my tradition to be there or to phone her. On her fiftieth birthday, Linda and I and Malinda and Joe had arrived in Ann Arbor early to get settled and register at the University of Michigan, and I phoned Mama, worrying that she was getting on up in age.

Mama was born one hundred years ago today, in Bluff Springs, Florida, the second child of Mamie Gillard McClammy Gentry and Walter Henry Gentry. Early, because my grandfather went into Gentry Brothers Loans and Pawns with two of his brothers, the family moved to East Strong Street on East Hill in Pensacola, where my mother grew up and where throughout my own growing up years we had many happy visits with grandparents who always made me feel very special and much loved. It was there that as a student at Pensacola High School, Mama met my father, and they started dating, and with Mama's brother Wilbur owned a topless Model-T Ford touring car named Jim that they told me about many times over the years.

It was that neighborhood where I learned to ride a bike and to roller-skate, because, unlike here in PC, they had sidewalks all the way around the block. It was that house where my mother grew up that years later as teenagers, my cousin Bill and I would bide our time until the grandparents went out to play cards for a long evening with friends or relatives, then take whichever Chrysler they left at home and enjoyed an hour or two driving at high speed on dark Pensacola streets, keeping sharp eyes out for cops and never getting caught and proving that teenagers are invincible and immortal just as much then as now.

It was there where my mother grew up that we went every Christmas afternoon and the house filled with aunts and uncles and cousins rushing over to see us. There are innumerable special memories of being there in the house where my mother grew up -- an aunt’s wedding, my mother’s older brother’s wife’s funeral in July 1939 a day or so after my brother was born, another aunt’s wedding. My mother and father probably were married there too.

On hot summer Sunday afternoons at 1317 East Strong Street in Pensacola, the front doorbell would ring and a boy dressed in white, including white pillbox hat, would stand there delivering a quart container of orange sherbet that he had pedaled at top speed from the drug store soda fountain three blocks away. Had it not been for May 7, 1912, these memories would not be cluttering the cubbies of my mind.

In my earliest clear memory of my mother, I am two years old at Dr. Roberts’ Clinic on Cove Boulevard to have my tonsils out. After the surgery my father brings me a vanilla ice-cream cone, which I want very much. But I take one lick and am nauseated, so mama eats my ice-cream. Mama was 81 when my father died on July 20, 1993 and she told me she was in good health and feared she would live to be a hundred without him. She died exactly eighteen years later, July 17, 2011, age 99, almost having done just that. I was the last person there to commend her to almighty God and make the sign of the cross on her forehead as she was wheeled away that drizzly Sunday morning. In conversation the year before he died, I promised my father that I would look after her as long as she lived, and I tried earnestly to keep my promise. She was always very dear to me. Happy birthday, Mama!

Love,

Bubba