Happy Birthday

Year’s Mind. Mama was born 101 years ago today, in Bluff Springs, Florida north of Pensacola, and named Hazel Louise Gentry. Her family called her Weesie or Weese, Louise. She never said why, but she hated the name Hazel and tucked it away hidden, we were to tell it to no one. My father once, when the church office asked her full name, told it. Church mail to her started arriving addressed to Hazel, and she was furious. 

When Mama was little, the Walter Henry Gentry family moved from Bluff Springs to a rented house on E. Strong Street in Pensacola. The house directly across the street soon came for sale and my grandparents bought it and moved across to 1317, where my mother with her father Walt -- who when my grandmother Mamie was impatient with him she shouted, Henry! -- and her two sisters and two brothers grew up. That’s where she was living during years at Pensacola High School, when A. D. Weller and family, still in agonizing grief and moving restlessly from here to there after the 1918 death of my father’s brother Alfred, rented a small gray house on Cervantes, around the corner and a block away.  

Morning routine. Up, perhaps earlier than most people. Downstairs quietly, stepping over stair number four and stair number eight, which, dating from 1912, creak badly. I always count, and step eighteen is onto the dining room floor. Go to kitchen, turn on coffee maker. Family room, time on the treadmill at a fairly uncomfortable steep angle, like walking uphill, to get the heart excited. Greek yogurt. Coffee. Examen. Chapter of James Martin, S.J. Open MacBook, click Google news and scan, click Gmail and read, including word-a-day. This week, words that sound bad but aren’t. Yesterday, queer street. Today, niggler. Do notice the “L” please. Interesting words, but so far I’m not going to sneak any of them into the pulpit. 

In my earliest memory of my mother I am two years old. I have just wakened from being in a shining white room lying on a stainless steel table under a bright white light surrounded by people in white, one of whom lays a terrible smelling cloth over my nose and mouth and my head starts buzzing. Dr. Roberts has removed my tonsils and my throat is sore and my stomach queasy. My father has brought me a vanilla ice cream cone, which I wanted badly. But I took one lick and was sick to my stomach, so Mama ate my ice cream. 

My second memory is in the back seat of our 1935 Chevrolet, rounding the curve of Massalina Drive onto Allen or Linda Avenue, all dirt roads. My mother is driving and I’m looking at her black hair, done up in a bun. I asked, “Mommie, how old are you?” She says “29.” That makes me five years old. 

Labor Day, September 1941. Mama sits me down at the dining room table and says, “Bubba, you’re starting school tomorrow. What do you want them to call you?” Thinking about it, I say, “Not Bubba. How about Tom?” She says, “No, it can’t be Tom. In high school I had a boyfriend named Tom, and your daddy still hates him” -- 

My father died at age 82 on July 20, 1993. Mama died at 99 eighteen years later, July 17, 2011. Going through her things, including photographs from her childhood, we came across a picture of Mama and a tall, handsome young man. On the back is written, "Louise (16) and Tom (17)."

-- so my name is Thomas Carroll Weller, Jr. I am “Bubba,” which I do not wish to carry beyond the neighborhood. I am told that I cannot be “Tom.” My father has always been called “Carroll.” Only Johnny Cash singing "A Boy Named Sue" could possibly understand, but for the next twelve years from the Tuesday after Labor Day 1941 ’til September 14, 1953 my eighteenth birthday when my parents leave me at North Hall in Gainesville to start my freshman year at the University of Florida, I am “Carroll, Junior.” The first day of class the professor calls the roll. When he gets to W he calls, “Tom Weller” and I have my own name at last.

My habit all our life together was to phone my mother on her birthday. Never missed except our Navy years in Japan fifty years ago, when phoning was all but impossible. One birthday phone call I especially remember was May 7, 1962. We were living in Ann Arbor, where I was in graduate school at the University of Michigan. It was a memorable day, a milestone: Mama turned fifty. 

Some in my family have puzzled over what they see as my mental preoccupation, even obsession, with Alfred, my father's older brother. This was meant to be Alfred’s house. Last night I slept in Alfred’s bedroom, with the door open onto Alfred’s porch, and cool breeze from St. Andrews Bay coming in just as it did a hundred years ago when Alfred slept here. If the twin masted fishing schooner Annie & Jennie had made it to Carrabelle that bitter cold January 1918 night instead of being dashed to pieces in a terrible squall as it left the Old Pass, the A.D. Weller family would never have left St. Andrews, would never have moved into that little gray house on Cervantes Street in Pensacola. I would never have been, and neither would my loved ones who don't understand my love for Alfred. When I was a little boy, Mom, my grandmother, used to tell me stories about Alfred, whom she still loved dearly. Life is founded in eucharist, thanksgiving. A thanksgiving of my life is for Alfred: in his death is my life. 

But chiefly my mother. Happy Birthday, Mama.

love,

Bubba