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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
