My mom liked to tell me the story of how one day, she practically jumped out of her skin when her 5-month-old daughter uttered her first comprehensible English word: "Hi." Years later, in flipping through my baby book, I came across a rather extensive list of my pre-1-year-old vocabulary. So I guess you could say that I'm the verbal one. But I'll try to keep this brief and just tell a few anecdotes that I think give a pretty good character sketch of my mom.
One day when I was 5 years old, I was in the kitchen hoping to lick the icing bowl as my mom baked a cake. Either she was in a contemplative mood, or perhaps she sensed that her rowdy little daughter was also her most contemplative child, but she started talking to me about the Russian writer Dostoevsky. Okay... like I'm a 5 year old, and my mom is telling me about one of the most philosophical of all novelists, and for her it's like the most natural thing in the world! What's funny is that she was totally on target in gauging my interest. In fact, what she said haunted me for years. That day, she primed me for what was to come fourteen years later, when I finally read Dostoevsky. I fell for his work like I've never fallen for any other writer, except maybe Shakespeare. Dostoevsky spoke the language of my soul. He challenged me in matters of faith and mind and spirit, and I eventually wrote my Master's Thesis on his novel CRIME AND PUNISHMENT—the very novel my mom had spoken of on that day when I was 5 years old. It's like I had not even developed seriously abstract thought yet, but she knew me. She just knew I was her Dostoevsky girl.
Years later, she shocked everybody by cashing out her retirement to buy my brother a computer. The kid had already gone through other expensive equipment that was now sitting on the shelf, so nobody—including me—thought this computer thing was a very good idea. But my mom knew her son. And today, thanks to my mom's investment and belief in him, he manages the team that gets your NVidia Graphics card to communicate with your computer.
But let's back up for a moment. My mom—Jean Collins— was born in 1919 on a ranch outside of Hugo, Colorado, but she grew up mostly in Sedalia, Missouri. Her mother was a painter. Her aunt a piano virtuoso—a child prodigy who played classics and ragtime, and who later helped found the Scott Joplin Festival in Sedalia. My mom never thought she had the kind of talent that her mother or her aunt had. But don't let her self-effacement fool you. My mom was a culinary artist. That is, she was a champion cook. She won 9 prizes in a national contest which had 12,000 entries. She won 33 ribbons at the Los Angeles County Fair. But she never talked about those accomplishments. The only reason I still know about them today is that I came across a collection of newspaper clippings on my mom's baking feats.
See, my mom didn't talk much about herself. But she DID keep clipping files. A few years ago, I got a great example of just how deep her files went regarding me. She had already given me the contents from my college years—my first newspaper article, the program from a musical I'd played woodwinds for. But her files, it turned out, went much further back than that.
One day, I got a manila envelope in the mail. It was from my mom. When I opened it, it had just this old, yellowing piece of notebook paper in it. That's all. When I turned it over, though, my eyes opened wide. I could NOT believe she'd kept it!!!!!
You see, when I was about 10 years old, my mom enrolled my brother and me in a karate studio. One Saturday night, my studio was hosting a karate tournament that was being judged by this young TV actor I was a fan of. He wasn't a legend yet. He was just the guy who played Kato on THE GREEN HORNET. But over the years, as Bruce Lee became a seminal figure in kung fu cinema, I often wondered what became of the autograph I'd gotten him to sign that night. When I opened up the manila envelope, that old autograph was right there in my hands again... probably for the first time since the night, some 30 years earlier, when Bruce Lee had jotted it down on the flimsy piece of notebook paper I handed him. My mom had kept it... not knowing that he'd someday be a legend. She kept it because she knew it meant something to me.
I'm sure my siblings got similar gifts from her files as she cleaned them out in her later years. She'd kept them for her kids—who were, I think, the stars in her life. A week before she died, I walked into the room and with all the little strength she had, she beamed at me and said "There's the one I love." At Sunrise of Falls Church, where she spent the last few months of her life, they said she didn't talk or smile much when I was not around. But, before she lost her sociability to dementia, she would talk at length about her kids and grandkids, her mother and sisters, my dad's family, my cousins. I could tell you all about what my sister was experiencing in Jerusalem when I was 5, or what my cousin Dan was experiencing in China when I was in grad school. I heard all about it when my brother found his niche and started excelling in math and computer science. But I never could tell you much about my mom's life before she met my dad in Kansas City because she was so quiet about herself.
Probably because she grew up with a severely disabled older sister, my mom was a team player, not the star or her own world. At my mom's wedding, her younger sister, Marion, had been the Maid of Honor. But my mom wanted to make sure that Evelyn—her disabled sister, whom she adored—knew how much she, too, was valued. Six days after she was married, my mom sent this message on a postcard, specifically addressed to Evelyn:
Dear Evelyn—Boy, you sure looked pretty the day of the wedding! How did you like it? This is a very pretty place but we can't get used to the noise of the tide coming in. It sounds like it is awfully stormy and blowy. Jean Collins
When my grandmother needed some respite from taking care of Evelyn, my mom would take her sister into our home, to spend a month or two with us.
By the way, my mom was also resourceful... so resourceful that I still cringe when I tear the wrapping off a Christmas present because my mom had always been so adamant that the wrapping could be saved for later use if we gently removed it from our gifts—a quirk that I think was left over from the Depression.
You know, back in college when the question sometimes came up: "What does YOUR dad do for a living?" My friends would say stuff like "Oh, 'My dad's a judge.' Or 'My dad's a lawyer.'" I could top them all because my dad had bought nukes for the Air Force.
Of course, that sort of job doesn't really impress anybody in Washington, DC. But it got me a lot of mileage in Denton, Texas. Funny thing is: Nobody ever asked about my mom. Well, without my mom my dad would never have been able to do what he did. She paid the bills. She ran the errands. She got the kids to and from music lessons, to and from karate lessons, to and from band practice, to and from whatever we needed. She would go to the library and take out books to fan my interest in the English Wars of the Roses, or Homer or Virgil or Beowulf. She called the Jazz Deejay in Los Angeles to tell him about her daughter who wanted to play jazz. He turned out to be the guy who recommended that I attend University of North Texas. She followed my interests, she read the books I was reading in grad school. She just basically devoted her life to her kids, throughout all stages of our lives. And into my early adulthood, she also worked a full-time job.
My mom, in other words, was amazing. In her last few months, I would tell her that she "rocked." That she "TOTALLY rocked." And she would laugh. My mom was the woman of noble character from Proverbs 31.
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