Flight 512

When you are young, things seem possible. Your dreams still have lift, texture and shine. As my family drove back to Illinois homeless and broke, I can imagine my mother – with two babies and an erratic unpredictable, intoxicated husband – felt her grip on those dreams melt away like the sweat from her brow as the car headed north, making its way through the humid landscape of corn rows and bean fields. She was going home, the only home she’d ever known: 512.

            One spring morning in 1942, she found herself coming into a world that had not been planned for her in this very house. Her mother, my grandmother Lillie, was forty-one years old and having a child at that age was certainly not what she wanted. It had been such a strain on her heart that she was bedridden because of it. My mother’s life up to this car ride had been sheltered and not in the direction she dreamed of going. Growing up in a town I will lovingly refer to simply as Shit Town, she found a hell on earth. She wasn’t what you would call “in” with the popular group, or any group for that matter, during her public school life, and being shy and meek and eager to please, she found herself rolled over by everything and everyone.

            There are two kinds of people: smashers and shooers. This is a woman who would not hurt a fly. She would shoo a fly before she was swat one. She was basically a happy, quiet child that played a lot by herself, as most of her siblings were older. By the time she was born she had two older brothers serving in the military, that whole WW2 thing, a teenage sister and another older brother who was five. She was the baby of the bunch and by the time she was five or six years old she was alone.

            Finding yourself alone most of your childhood breeds loneliness to a certain extent, but it really cultivates your imagination. You have to create your own entertainment, your own fun. But no matter how you grow up, at some point you find yourself needing some kind of validation of the dreams you have conjured in your heart and mind. My mother never had that. Not from family, not from friends, not from school teachers. The realization of how lonely her childhood was breaks my heart. I’m not saying she wasn’t loved at home. She was. She loved her mother and idolized her daddy. Her sister Flora feeling, I’m guessing, a little bit of solidarity, being one of two sisters, always tried to include my mom in the things she was doing.

Flora eventually went to college, the first in the family to do so. She graduated from a teaching college in Normal, Illinois and went on to work with special education right out of school. She took a job in Germany to teach army brats on the U.S. military bases and by 1968 she was living in California teaching in Sacramento. She sent my mom financial help during this difficult time, a practice she would continue until her death.

 As the car turned right on Elm and came to be parked in the driveway at 512, my mother made a decision. All the years of being looked over, picked on, pushed down, after years of turning the other cheek, she stiffened. She looked at my sister and me and looked over at my dad as he filled the car with hollow promises of change and pleading for forgiveness. She made one of the bravest actions of her life. She chose to save herself and her children and cut loose the deadweight that threatened to sink them all. She divorced my dad, not for herself, but for us. She knew what would be said to her by her family. The “I told you so’s” would be as plentiful as the stars in the sky. The question, “How do you expect to raise two children on your own with no job, no money?”. She jumped, sacrificing all her dreams, to save us. I learned this somewhere in my thirties and I was so proud of her. This meek, quiet, unassuming lamb stood up like a lioness against an uncertain, scary future. Our flight to 512 North Elm Street in Shit Town, Illinois was complete. I was home and didn’t even know it. This address had been an oasis for wayward children and lost animals since it was purchased in the 1930’s. And so began my life as a fatherless son.

            Mother’s Day has just passed and I reflect on how much my mother has given up to be a mom. It has inspired me to try to do whatever I can for my kids. You made the right decision that day Mom. I know you probably have doubted a lot of things you have done with raising us, but you did good the day you set us free. Thanks Mom.