eleven exactly

 

As I started my car to back out of the garage into the light drizzle, Linda came out the back door of The Old Place and tapped on the car window. 

"Community called: your mother just died."

It was seven o'clock Sunday morning, July 17, 2011, exactly eleven years ago this moment. I was dressed and headed to HNEC for the eight o'clock service, intending to head out to see her after church. She was at Community Rehab out US 231 because she kept falling, including once during the night, and couldn't get up, and twice had been taken to the hospital by ambulance.

When I got there, she was still warm. And as I removed her wedding ring to give to Susanna, the nurse said, "You must be her son? She asked me, 'Where's my Bubba'." 

Mama had recently passed her ninety-ninth birthday. She was born Hazel Louise Gentry, on May 7, 1912, at McDavid, Florida: from Pensacola, you drive out Palafox, north on US29 about to Bluff Springs near the Florida Alabama line. It was a farming community, her Gentry and McClammy grandparents had farms out there. 

Mama once told me that her grandfather would come in from the field about noon, have his dinner, which her grandmother would have ready. After dinner he would go outside onto the porch, take out his pocket knife, lie down on the swing with his hand holding the knife, and doze off to sleep. When his hand relaxed and dropped the knife, the noise of it hitting the wooden floor of the porch with a bang woke him up. Nap over, he got up and went back out to the field.

When Mama was very young, her father Walter Henry Gentry (my brother is Walter Gentry Weller) moved the family from Bluff Springs into Pensacola and joined his brothers, her Uncle Lee and Uncle Eb, in Gentry Bros Loans & Pawns, who as my grandfather liked to boast, had "been in business since nine." Mama's parents rented a house on the north side of East Strong Street in East Hill. About 1915 the house directly across the street came up for sale, and they bought it. Mama told me that her earliest memory was family and neighbors helping them move across to 1317 E. Strong Street, people running back and forth with furniture, dishes, clothes on clothes hangars.

The picture above is of that house where Mama grew up, and where my parents were married. It holds fondest memories for me, from visits to my beloved grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. When I visited there as a teenager, my grandparents liked to go out to friends' houses to play cards evenings, leaving one car at home. After they left, my cousin Bill Gentry and I would take the other car and drive the streets of East Hill at high speed. There were always two Chryslers, and our evenings were best when they went in the Windsor Six, leaving the Imperial V8 at home.

My brother Walt texted me the picture Friday evening, the house has been totally renovated inside, but the exterior still looks the same, including the cracks in the concrete driveway that were there when I was a boy.

Mama met my father when A D Weller and family moved into a little gray house a couple of blocks away, on Cervantes Street and my father, called Carroll all his life (as was I from age six until age eighteen, a story to be told yet more time again some other Time), went to Pensacola High School, a year ahead of her. He became best friends with her brother Wilbur, and that's how that got started. Which forms into my personal story of my very existence because my Weller grandparents moved back to Pensacola for a while some years after the death of my father's brother Alfred.

The house at 1317 had much love for me. Along with many stories including that while in high school the three of them, Mama, her brother, and my father, bought a Model T Ford for fifteen dollars. The car, which they named Jim, had no taillamp, so when driving at night they'd light a railroad lantern and hang it on the rear of the car, where it banged noisily. 

Jim had a "cut-out" so they could step on the cut-out button on the floorboard and cut out the tail pipe and muffler, for a deafening roar of the car's motor.

Cars, I always loved cars, and Mama like to tell me about their cars. My grandfather Gentry rode a bicycle back and forth to work until 1924, when he bought his first car, a light blue Maxwell touring car. There were five children, so he bought seven-passenger cars with jump seats. When Walter P Chrysler bought Maxwell out, he changed Maxwell to Chrysler, and my grandfather always bought only Chryslers and Plymouths, except for the 1934 DeSoto Airflow that I've written about, and the Auburn. Mama talked with me about the Auburn again the last Time I visited her at Community. She said it was two-tone red, a beautiful car. When she finished telling it, she asked me, "Why did you want to know about that?" I told her that I just wanted to hear her tell me a story. She was ninety-nine, I was seventy-five. It isn't every man who still has his mother when he's seventy-five years old.

My mother was my champion. She encouraged me. All my growing up years, in my presence, she bragged on me to others, embarrassing me no end. I once asked her not to do that. The next time others were around she bragged on me about something, then said, "It embarrasses him when I talk about him." My mother is the only person in my life who ever apologized to me, always for something she'd said or done that saddened me. 

We are three: there are three of us. Me, Gina, and Walt. Two brothers living here in Florida. Our sister waiting for us somewhere in Eternity.

RSF&PTL

Bubba