Mama

July the Seventeenth. My mother died ten years ago this morning, two months and ten days past her ninety-ninth birthday. A rainy Sunday. As I backed my car out of the carport at the Old Place, headed to Holy Nativity for the early service, Linda came out to the car in the drizzling wet and stopped me.

"Community called. Your mother just died."

Plans change. In the long run it doesn't matter. I had meant to drive out to see her after church, as, to rationalize myself, I did once or twice every day for weeks. It doesn't help life or guilt to have your mother in a care center and her upset because you won't take her home. But your best plans don't matter to Time. She had been in the rehab center since her most recent fall at home, unsteady, deaf, blind, failing. But dying, death: was it expected? When you are five it doesn't occur to you that your mother will not live forever. When you are seventy-five, as I was that steamy morning, you are pretty sure why the telephone is ringing.

As I entered the facility, in clerical garb as a priest on his way to church, an attendant nodded to me and said, "Sorry about your loss". In her room I did my priestly things - - "Depart, O Christian soul, out of the world, in the Name of God the Father, who created you; in the Name of God the Son, who redeemed you; in the Name of God the Holy Spirit, who sanctifies you. May your resting place be this day in the paradise of God. May your company be His saints and holy angels, and those you loved and who loved you in this life. May the Lord bless ... . "

Her face was warm. I pressed her eyes shut, but they didn't stay. I took her hand, held it, remembering years. Removed her wedding ring, which she had marked for a granddaughter. Started making phone calls from the room, to siblings and others, waited in the room a couple of hours until the man came from Southerland's. Then waited outside in the drizzle until he wheeled the gurney out and, pushing back the cover, made the sign of the cross on my mother's forehead as I saw her face for the last time.

The middle of July: key folks were away on vacation then as now, so with them I scheduled the funeral for two weeks away. The bishop called, they had usually stayed at our big house during his visitations to parishes in Panama City, and mama always looked forward to it and relished picking an argument with him, and he with her. Don't remember what about, just the inevitability. I always appreciated him. He and Kathy came for the funeral too, and he vested and took part, it was a good send-off. Roast beef, and John made a good selection of wines.

Mama was born in Bluff Springs, out the road a piece, north of Pensacola. Moved into Pensacola when she was, as I recall, two years old. Her father was lifelong at Gentry Bros. Loans & Pawns with his brothers Lee and Eb.

After two or three years, the house across the street from them came up for sale, her parents bought it, and mama remembered everyone carrying lamps and furniture, pillows and things across the street as they moved in. Clothes on hangars from old closet to new. Strong Street in East Hill, they moved there in the nineteen-teens, and it was my favorite place to be all my growing up years, staying with doting, tolerant and permissive grandparents, and cousins.

The cars that were there, lined up in the driveway, always open for us kids to play in them. vroooom, vroom. Mama told me about a two-tone red Auburn sedan during the early thirties, but all the rest, all in my memory, were Chryslers and Plymouths; and one DeSoto, a silver colored 1934 Airflow that I've remembered here before. Ralphie said, "Some men are Baptists, others Catholics, my father was an Oldsmobile man" - - my grandfather Gentry was Baptist and a MoPar man.

Before their first car, which mama described as a blue 1924 Maxwell or Chrysler touring car, he rode a bicycle and rode the streetcar. There were three kids, then four, then five. Sometimes her dad stopped off on the way home after work, then came whizzing up Strong Street with two or three warm oyster loafs for supper. Years later, Mama used to make them for us when we were growing up, a favorite supper treat. Sometimes he was riding even faster, bringing a quart of ice cream, or orange sherbet. He was an easy man to love.

Sunday mornings, he drove to East Hill Baptist Church, what? three blocks away, parked in his favorite spot on the corner, then turned around and gave each child in the back seat a nickel for Sunday School offering. I remember those Sunday mornings, the light green 1942 Chrysler Windsor sedan, parked next to someone's 1937 Cord Winchester. Daddy Walt, we called him, is at least half of where I got my car genes.

I remember Mother's Day 1949. After the war the first car Daddy Walt could buy for my grandmother was a club coupe, a 1946 Chrysler that she never stopped complaining about the inconvenience of "two doors". Although, come to think of it, my mother's brother's wife had died in 1939, and they had taken in the children, cousins my age, Margaret and Bill, maybe the two door car was for their safety? IDK.

Anyway, Mamoo, her name for some of us grandchildren, others called her Nannie, Mothers Day 1949 she came out where we were waiting in the bright shiny new light blue Chrysler Windsor sedan, a surprise for her. She was cool, never seemed too eager to please him by being delighted with a gift, glanced at the car, said, "Oh boy, four door", got in the front seat and that was it. Off to church, each of us kids wearing our red or white flower.

That's enough for now. I've told stories about them. My memory this morning started with my mother, who liked to tell me about when she was growing up. In the last ten years I've built up a list of questions that I'll never have the chance to ask her. I'll never stop missing the stories, and her.