My Mama can Beat up Your Mama

MY MOM CAN BEAT UP YOUR MOM

Well, not really. I just wanted to catch your attention and get you to read about my mother. In fact she would be horrified to see my title because it is so far afield and such a mischaracterization of her. I should be ashamed of myself, but I’m not. And that’s her fault. She taught me to not be ashamed or afraid to act on my ideas.

Actually she was never Mom or Mother, she was Mama to me and my three brothers, and anything other than “Mama” is alien to my tongue. At age five when I went for the doctor’s exam to enter first grade, the doctor asked me my mother’s name, and I told him, “Mama”. “Yes, but what does your father call her?” He pursued. I thought for a moment, and answered, “Monkey”, which was an appellation of endearment I had heard my father use. Before we left the doctor’s office, I learned Mama’s first name was Floy, but in the southern tradition of using first and middle names, she answered to Floy Bell.

My mother was born in Booger Hollow, Arkansas, in 1913, and lost her mother to typhoid at age six. She had only six years of schooling, but that did not diminish her ability to manage the household finances or shepherd four active boys to adulthood. She did this while rising early every day to cook breakfast for the family and pack a lunch for my father. His ten and eleven hour workdays kept him worn out, so raising us was pretty much a Mama enterprise.

Mama married my Daddy when she was 21. She was, as George Jones sang, “country before country was cool”. She got her family through the depression on poke salad and salt meat, dipped snuff with my dad, was a great southern cook with an iron skillet and iron pot, and made the best drop biscuits ever. My children used to drink out of jelly glasses. I grew up drinking out of snuff glasses, thanks to the acumen of W. E. Garret and Sons in selecting snuff jars.

Shortly after I was born, at my grandmother’s farmhouse rental, my parents decided to buy a house. A brand new two bedroom house in town. However, my mother conditioned the move on grandma, her two youngest sons, and her daughter, the youngest, moving and living with us. My younger brother was not yet born, so only nine of us moved into the new house. This was in 1940 with WWII yet to come.

Running water, electricity, indoor plumbing and a gas stove and heater were a welcome novelty. Wrap your mind around this. The note on the 25 year mortgage was $13 and some cents. Some years later when the monthly note went up to over $18 a month, it was my mother who had to tease the extra money out of already strained finances, to pay the increase.

Things were tense for a while. We all learned the importance of Ben Franklin’s “a penny saved is a penny earned”. Mama kept her coins tied in a handkerchief. She never used a coin purse.

Somehow, we were able to keep a telephone. Some friends and neighbors did not have a phone, and when their sons went off to fight in WWII, they were given our number to call when they wanted to speak with family. Sharing was important; family was important.

Looking back, it is clear that my mother taught me patience, the importance of money management, tolerance, sharing, and a taste for simple foods. My brothers, until her death in 1990, regularly dropped in on Mama and always found food in a pot on the stove awaiting them, beans, potatoes, turnip greens, pot roast, biscuits; something was always there. They would fix themselves a plate, take it to the front room, and eat it while chatting with Mama.

They would always come over while I was visiting, but motivation to eat was probably as important as was their desire to see me.

RIP. Mama, You were the center, and the center did hold!