Читать книгу Miss Boo Is Sixteen - Margaret Lee Runbeck - Страница 11

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When I was a child there was one most conspicuous fact about our family. But I never discovered it until I was grown up and could compare our life and our house with what I saw all around me.

The fact was that we were what is commonly called “poor people.” I know now that the reason this conspicuous fact was never fully grasped by us was my mother. So valiantly did she emphasize our riches that we never really found we were poor until long after the condition had passed.

And by that time I never could say to myself, “We used to be poor,” because whenever I remembered our circumstances such a wealth of happiness and adventure and comfort came flooding into my heart that I could only stand silent, wishing all families were as rich as we had been.

My mother, to begin with, was born with a purseful of fun in her mind. She could make a game of anything that had to be done. She had the grace of accepting necessities so they felt like choices. Her eager little face always leaps into my mind when I read that verse in Deuteronomy which says, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life.” She chose the “life” of enjoying what we had, instead of concentrating on the “death” of what we lacked. We never grieved over what we couldn’t have; we just had something else.

We walked miles sometimes to save a five-cent carfare. But our mother taught us the joy of walking, so that economizing seemed never the reason we walked.

Drudgery didn’t exist for her, yet when I remember all the “work” which flowed through her small hands, I cannot see how one woman could have accomplished it. She would tackle anything, no matter how strange a task it was, nor how large it appeared. “We’ll just pitch in,” she’d say. And pitch in we did.

She and my father bought a big old house when we were very small. It had to be a large house, because our only way of paying for it was to convert half of it into an apartment to be rented ... the best half, of course. Knowing how to make the “best” of anything, we kept the darkest part, and my mother brought make-believe sunshine into it with yellow wallpaper, and white paint and ruffled organdy.

The actual paper hanging was a picnic for all of us. We hired one room done, so we could all find out how trained paper-hangers tackle their work. Then we set to. Each of us had a dinner pail we carried to our work just as the professionals had carried theirs. At noon we sat on the floor with our backs against the wall and swapped shop-talk. My mother’s fables of big paper-hanging and paint jobs she had done in her time were the tallest tales of all. Her audacious imagination could scamper over any subject like a buffooning monkey.

She did everything in an original way, as if it never had been done before. I came home from school unexpectedly one morning and found her washing dishes with her best hat on.

“Just felt bored with carpet sweeping and dusting,” she confessed airily. “This is to remind me that if I hurry up and get finished, I can go someplace and see sights.”

Sometimes when we sat down to a meal, we found we were lunching at the Martha Washington Tea Shoppe, or the Eatum Up Lunch Counter. There would be humorous or absurdly “dainty” menu cards, listing all kinds of diverting foods. It wasn’t until years later that I realized these menus appeared when our budget was particularly narrow-minded. My mother never abandoned anything to dullness and disappointment; she could dress up anything with what she had in herself.

She was a proper-looking little woman, with demure curls and a small voice. She admired propriety above all outward graces. But at home she had a mischievous talent for make-believe which never left anything as she found it. She never told a story without outrageous impersonations. Her very verbs came to life and strutted behind footlights. Yet the drama of simple neighborhood “doings” had no malice, for she could not bear to hurt anyone ... not even with laughter. I remember once hearing her say, “It must hurt God’s feelings when we laugh at each other.”

Her days were filled with housework and canning and repairing and contriving, yet she always found time for countless little deeds of charity and neighborliness. “Everybody must share whatever they have. Some people can just give money, but we can give our time,” she used to say proudly. There was no disparaging of either gift, for both offerings were important and valuable. Some people have money; perhaps the more fortunate have time.

Sometimes we’d come running back from school and find her not at home. There would be some kind of note pinned on our back door, suggesting we “start dinner,” but suggesting it in some way that amused us. I remember one note, typewritten like a classified advertisement, which said:

Help Wanted: Two girls with exceptional ability to set table, pare potatoes, wash lettuce, slice tomatoes, open canned corn, and light oven with meatloaf inside. Lowest wages and highest praises.

The high board fence of “things we cannot possibly afford” could have hemmed us in on all sides, and made us all sorry for ourselves, and poor. But it never did, because my mother knew that what is within the heart is more real than anything which can be bought and added to the outside of living.

Yet, if there was some luxury that one of us craved unbearably, my mother usually found a way to manage it. She had a blithe way of snubbing necessities when she wanted to, in favor of luxuries. Once when I was about fourteen, there was a hat which I thought I couldn’t live without. Instead of trying to persuade me that it was only a silly whim, she treated it as seriously as I did.

“You think you want it so much you’ll remember it when you’re a grown woman?” she asked me. I knew I never would be the same if I couldn’t have that hat.

“All right, my darling. You’ll have it,” she said.

“But how?”

“Never mind how,” she said, setting her lips firmly. “We’ll give up butter and eat gravy for a few weeks. The butter would just blur into oblivion, but if you really love the hat that much, it will live with you as long as you live.” It has, too.

It has been many years since I saw that merry little blue-eyed face ... merry until the very last minute of her life. When we lost her quite suddenly, I thought the window through which I looked into heaven had been closed forever.

We were going to be apart now, and there would not even be letters. Then a curious thing happened to me. Something seemed to lay a gentle hand on my mind, and without words Something seemed to tell me that the letters would not stop at all, if I would only receive them. They would come to me somehow, but I would have to look for them and recognize them, for they would be wearing disguises. They would borrow all sorts of shapes to say themselves to me. I could not know how they would come, and my grief at first was too deep to look above itself. But they waited for me to look.

I find them now over and over in the most unexpected places. I find them in something a stranger says to me with a quick merry lift of laughter; I find them sometimes in my own thoughts. I may be cogitating on some subject and suddenly there will flash across my mind a bright parenthesis, a tucked-in comment which I recognize.

Once a year we in America celebrate Mother’s Day. Those whose mothers are still within touching distance, give flowers. The rest of us who have had to learn something of this I have tried to say, need no flowers nor any other stumbling symbols. For nothing which has helped make our heart the living thing it is, can ever be lost.

The having and then the not-having have left a knowledge that is bigger than symbols, and closer than breath.