Personal Reflections On Alabama

Wes and Angie at Children's Chapel by Lake Martin

My cousin Angie reminds me of my mother.  I can’t think of higher praise.  She’s always sweet and welcoming in the best ways.  Her home has lots of thoughtful touches to make it as comfortable as it is beautiful, and as such is an extension of her.  I don’t know why the similarity never occurred to me before this last trip.  The twinkle in her brown eyes and her warm smile say it all.

Making that connection suddenly helped me visualize Mom as a young girl, because when I was a little boy, I saw Angie as my favorite cousin Steve’s baby sister.  Angie is blonde, and my mother as a little girl had curly brown hair like Shirley Temple, but I can now imagine little Mary pleading “Quee-it” when her brother Edwin pestered her. 

On this visit, Angie has reached the stage of life where she has two sons in college.  It’s hard to believe my baby cousin’s children can be grown men.   Like my mother at that stage, she is a single mom.

Granddaddy and Grandmother about 1965

The biggest mistake of my dad’s life was divorcing my mother immediately after I graduated from high school.  They had almost broken up a couple of times previously, and in looking at old photos from about the period of a reconciliation where my grandparents came to visit.  In Granddaddy’s eyes, I can see anger at Dad (the photographer) for putting Mom through what he had, a look that says, “I’m not impressed by you or the modern age when leaving your family is okay.”  I don’t otherwise remember that look flashing through his cheerful face.

Make no mistake, my dad was a wonderful father and provider.  I really don’t know how he made Darlene and I always feel so secure when his occupation was hair dresser, which has always been a highly competitive field with lots of ups and downs.  He had the disposition of a highly successful man, and when neighbors in totally unrelated fields lost jobs, they would come to him for advice.  He was a very good man in almost every way, including bringing people who were down on their luck home for a meal or giving them a spot in our guest room for weeks or even months at a time.

He was not, however, monogamously inclined.  His divorcing Mom was not simply a matter of losing a wonderful life partner, but also of missed financial gain.  He dissipated much of his energy and earnings on short marriages to less suitable partners, whereas if he had just stayed the course with Mom, all his dreams would have unfolded.  For example, he had extensive aviaries in our backyard in Westminster, primarily because he loved birds in particular and all animals in general (yes, we had a cat, dog, parrot, tropical fish, hamsters, rabbits, turtles, rabbits, guinea pigs…).  But in the case of African peach-faced love birds, also as an investment.  On our frequent weekend trips to bird farms, he would discuss the fact that at some point the import of these birds would be banned, and the domestic stock would become quite valuable.  Shortly after their divorce, that law did indeed pass, but my dad had sold off all the birds before tearing down the aviaries in preparing for his departure.  The old story about Acres of Diamonds comes to mind, especially in terms of the diamond he had in my mother.

Darlene, Dad, Mom and Wes about 1963

My mother was always polite to him and even his string of new wives, because that the essence of who she was always came out, just as squeezing an orange will never yield anything toxic.  She said she never regretted her marriage or the time she had to be home with the kids, despite the fact that by the time she re-entered the work world, she found herself relegated to menial positions below her considerable intelligence and ability.

Angie, on the other hand, has been divorced for many years already, and with her mom and dad helping with things like getting the kids to and from school, she has been able to maintain a successful career.  I don’t know what happened to break them up, but Angie seems to have dealt with it effectively.  She still lives up the dirt driveway from her in laws, with whom she apparently does not have a strained relationship, although their hound dogs barking at and darting in front of cars that come up the driveway may aggravate some visitors.  More importantly, both her sons are wonderful young men.  Jonathan, a mechanical engineering major, has worked summers for Chevron on the Gulf Coast, and he already sees a future where he possibly goes to a remote location like Siberia to work a month, returning home to a little auto shop where he can work on the side.  Zachary is a sophomore, and while he has a part time job as well as full time studies, he’s still focused on those wonderful years of being a college student.  They’ll both do well, and I wish I had done more to make my mother proud.

While they live in what even cousin Donald calls the backwoods, they’ve got  all the modern conveniences including iPhones.  Angie’s sons have trained her well, because when a tornado was tearing through Huntsville on the evening our plane would be arriving, I received a text from Angie to see if we were alright.  Just like California or East Coast kids, messaging seems to be the preferred mode of communication for Auburn University students.  To paraphrase the funny Virgin Mobile commercial says, only a visionary like Richard Branson would have the foresight to know that in the future we would talk with our thumbs.