THE YOGA CHRONICLES: CONFESSIONS OF A RELUCTANT YOGI

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY”

            She was the only daughter of the richest man in a small town, a uniform success by the standards of any age. Double-promoted twice at Rusk High School, she graduated as Valedictorian well before her seventeenth birthday.

            The day she was married, she had a nineteen -inch waist and her wedding dress had to be taken up three times. It was a size 2.

            The guy she didn’t marry was the runner-up for the 1955 Heisman Trophy.

            She helped put her husband through the University of Texas, living in Quonset huts built for the Navy in the 1940s. She held a young family together in the sixties, while her husband was on the road half the year. She often did it without benefit of air conditioning or a car. Neighbors would simply baby-sit each other’s children while they went to the grocery store.

            When asked about it, she would shrug and say, “That’s just what we did.”

            She was a Cub Scout den mother, a field trip chaperone, and the undisputed champion of the bake sale, all the while never missing a sports event for three very active sons.

            To return home from school was to find to find her exquisite apple pie, her heavenly banana pudding, or her no-bake chocolate oatmeal cookies, timed perfectly to be warm and gooey for my return home.

            Every day.

            Some of her happiest moments were watching the hordes of hungry boys in her kitchen, devouring her creations. She loved to tell the story of watching Pat Hightower and Bryan Forman finish one of her patented banana puddings in one sitting. With serving spoons. She coaxed drunken fraternity boys to go to sleep with promises of biscuits and cream gravy the next morning, God’s own cure for common hangover.

            She presided over her dinner table like the prime minister of a particularly bad European parliament, raising not one but three lawyers under the same roof.

            She entertained governors and congressman, planned charity balls, and was as comfortable in a honky-tonk as she was at the country club.

            She essentially ran a small oil company when my grandfather was incapacitated.

            She had a shoe collection that Imelda Marcos would have admired.

            She has never missed a Dallas Cowboy football game. Ever.

She got her bachelors degree in her late sixties, her masters in her seventies, and was admitted into a doctoral program at 73.

She is fiercely protective of her family. “Territorial” only begins to describe her. She would throw herself in front of a bus before she let something happen to “one of hers.”

She can be imperious, easily bored, and does not suffer fools gladly. You can tell that by the fixed smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

Had she been born in any later age, my mother would have been the dean of an English Department, making graduate students cry and sending professors scurrying to their cubicles, having unleashed the wintry gales of her wrath.

 Or general manager of the Cowboys.

And then there’s the hair.

In her ninth decade, the hair remains …formidable. It is as thick as it has always been and only now are there hints of gray. And while do feel a certain guilt that my mother’s hair may have contributed to that hole in the ozone layer, her hair is somehow comforting, sitting there like a crown on her head, regal and steadfast.

It is the Mount Rushmore of Hair. Mountains will crumble, seas will dry up, and glaciers will melt into puddles before my mother’s hair goes.

            But this is not what I will remember about my mother.

            What I will remember is Parent’s Day at Andy Woods Elementary School in the winter of 1970.

            It was a Friday. I saw her arrive through the window of my fifth-grade classroom, the midday sun shining down on her so that she appeared to be positively sparkling. Fresh from the beauty shop, her hair was elaborately (but not too elaborately) coiffed with the tips frosted just so. Her nails were red and her she was wearing her jewelry, which did in fact sparkle in the sun as she strode from her Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight to my class.

She was wearing a brown mid-length accordion -pleated leather skirt, knee-length shiny boots, and a camel jacket over a jewel-toned paisley blouse that tied at the neck. Over it all was her sable, which anchored the entire outfit. 

As I watched her stride toward my classroom, I felt a tremendous rush of pride as I was certain that, nowhere in the world, could there be a more beautiful or glamourous mother.

I remember her entrance into the classroom distinctly. Our desks faced the door of classroom and when she entered, she seemed to glow, bringing light and energy into the room.

When she stepped into the class, I sensed my classmates felt the perceptible need to rise in her presence, as if royalty had arrived. She became the immediate object of fascination and one could hear the murmurs of approval throughout the room. For her part, she felt obliged to smile an apology to the teacher for the interruption, who somehow sensed that long addition was done for a moment.

As she made her way back to my desk, she smiled at familiar faces, her absolute pleasure in the moment returned with the incandescent smiles of my classmates. A wink here, a ruffled head of hair there, she owned the class with every step.

My mother was a straight-up rock star.

When she got to me, I did something no ten -year old boy has ever done: I hugged my mother in public. Even more interestingly, there was no male-pattern teasing to chronicle it.

They knew.

Lunch with Jackie Kennedy could not have generated more political and social in-fighting than that day in the Andy Woods cafeteria, as my classmates fought and bickered to sit at the table with my mother.

She charmed them all. She held court. She laughed and smiled and told stories.

Oddly, I didn’t seem to mind sharing her but, every now and again, she would smile and wink at me- only at me -and I felt the way a son is supposed to feel in the presence of his mother.

I can only remember thinking this is the way it is supposed to be.

Madre, I could have gotten you another bottle of Chanel No. 5 or taken you to lunch at El Fenix, but this is my gift this year.

This one was always for you.

Happy Birthday.

Love, Me

© Thomas C. Barron 2018