I thought I'd write a little bit about my mother. She died in June 2000, still a void in my life that I suspect never will fill. She was born on this day in 1913, the last of eight siblings, not counting two who died as infants. She grew up on a farm in the Arkansas Ozarks, a few miles east of what is now Lake Norfolk, a few more miles east of Mountain Home. Her father's family came to Arkansas from Ohio after the Civil War, which I guess made them carpetbaggers, although like most Americans heading west in the 19th century, they were mostly just looking for open land. The farm was handed down to the eldest son, my Uncle Ted, who had set up his own farm next door. We visited Ted often when I was a child, and I've been to the now abandoned farm as recently as two years ago. One of Ted's daughters still lives in the area, but the rest of the family scattered to points west. Even within my lifetime the area has lost much of the density it once had.

My mother was named Bessie, a name she always hated. Later she insisted on going as Bea, but she was never able to retrain her family. I don't know much about her life before she married. I never was much good at asking questions, and there were questions she never much wanted to answer. I know that she took sick with some fever (typhoid, I think) and was confined to her bed for a year, missing school. She never came close to graduating high school. She could read some, and wrote in a nice hand, but her spelling was atrocious. I don't know that any of her siblings finished high school -- one reportedly took to moonshining over fourth grade, and never learned to read at all. But my mother had a stubborn, independent streak. She worked, saved, travelled. She used to have a box of picture postcards from the east, with occasional references to someone named Riley, never explained. But she did talk about seeing Tommy Dorsey in Atlantic City. And a cousin remembers her showing up in Idaho with an astonishing wardrobe. But most of the time she probably spent in Oklahoma, where two of her sisters had farms and her mother moved after her father died in 1936. And in the '40s she moved to Augusta KS, where her other sister lived. During the war they both got jobs at Beech Aircraft in Wichita.

Later, she met my father, marrying him in 1948, when she was 35 and he 25. I was born two years later, followed by a brother and a sister. Mom quit her job before having me, and obsessively pursued the stereotypical role of '50s housewife. My father also grew up on a farm, had little more education, and worked all his adult life in the Boeing factory. We had a small tract house on the south side of Wichita. My parents worked hard, saved, paid off their mortgage within five years, and built extra rooms on the back. It was the only house they ever had -- my brother lives there now. Aside from that first mortgage, they never had any debt or credit. (None of their three children have mortgages either.) Regardless of education, both of my parents had exceptional practical skills, and much of what I'm able to do comes from watching them.

When I was a child, my mother had incredible energy. She dominated the marriage and the family. She was a perfectionist, and demanded as much, especially from me. She expected much of me because I was quite smart, and after some rocky episodes she kept faith in me even when she had no clue what I was saying or doing. (My teenage years were very rough, but that's some other story.) She was righteous. She had a deep sense of right and wrong, which she developed independently from what preachers told her, and she was extraordinarily stubborn in her convictions. The example she talked most about was card playing, one of her great loves. She insisted that card playing is fine as long as you never cross the line into gambling. She never did, and for that matter neither have I. She was rigorously honest, and she could not abide crookedness. Like most yankees from her narrow part of the Arkansas hills, she grew up Republican, but she turned on Nixon and never looked back. She believed in God, and revelled in the music, but didn't care much for preachers or churches, who were far more fallible than her own judgment. She was devoted to family, and managed to keep remarkably close tabs on her by then far flung family.

She had some faults which we needn't belabor now, but one was that she was very deferential to authority, which caused us a lot of trouble. I spent my adolescent and young adult years trying to escape her grip, which ultimately proved impossible and mostly undesirable. In the end, I reverted to my childhood, hoping that my life might please her, and in the end she was magnanimous enough that it did. She was able to live with contradictions where I could not, so I wound up jettisoning her lesser beliefs, like God and country, in order to carry on her greater beliefs. I got my sense of ethics from her, and my sense of purpose. Can't say as it's always served me well, but can't imagine life without it either.