My mother’s debutante dreams were right there, sacked up in a small plastic bag sitting alone on a metal workbench in my father’s garage.
I’d used those same bags to buy nuts and bolts at the Ace Hardware down the street. I poured about a dozen charms and pins out on the table.
Some I recognized: A Girl Scouts pin. Tiny Austin High School and drama club charms. Others spelled it out for me: “1960-61 Miss Y-Teen Finalist,” and “Singer Young Stylemaker Contest Qualifier’s Award.”
My mother grew up in an upper middle-class family – maybe even wealthy – in a Hyde Park home in Austin. During the 1960-61 school year, she would have been 14. Things would change terribly for her family, but at that moment she could have seen a bright high society future.
Sixty years later, her teenage treasures were in a plastic baggie on a workbench in Pilot Point, Texas. And my mother was dying of Alzheimer’s in the shadow of Oklahoma.
The mysteries abound for my mother’s side of the family, all stemming from the afternoon of Jan. 6, 1966, when my grandfather took a rifle and killed himself outside the family home.
Mom transferred to the University of Texas from Centenary College in Louisiana after that, but had little interest in classes.
Instead she would drive aimlessly around Austin in her Mustang, smoking cigarettes and developing the silence that would eventually characterize our family.
In late 1967, my mother found solace in the sturdy arms of a good-looking member of Texas A&M’s Corps of Cadets. I don’t know if she thought much about life as an Army wife, but she knew that my dad could take her far away.
I don’t mean to say that my childhood home was silent, really. I don’t remember being unhappy. We were an Army family, semi-isolated from relatives, but we did make occasional visits. When I was young, my parents even socialized with friends. My dad’s life was an open book, full of stories he’d tell for the first time every time he’d had enough whiskey.
But mom didn’t talk of her family, or at least was extremely guarded in what she would say. I was a grown man when I found out the my grandfather’s death was a suicide. I was in my 40s when I pieced together enough clues to realize that he was manic-depressive.
Mom and I weren’t particularly close, not in the way she was with my sister, Julie. There was love there, but I struggled with my own emotions and the silence suited me. Soon enough I was a wayward son like my father before me.
It’s no mystery how my parents came to Pilot Point – the story is familiar to far too many families. When my father retired from the Army, they bought a home outside of Gladewater which they slowly built into their dream home. They loved that house until my mom’s illness forced them to move to be close to Julie.
The three years they owned that home in Pilot Point were sad to the point that I often thought about what else could have happened – though I always came up with nothing. My mother wasn’t in the house long before she had to go to a memory care facility. My dad spent the second year in a succession of hospitals as age and hard living finally took its toll. In the third year he’d die in a hospital bed in the living room.
Going through the house and the memories, we discovered a few new things – I’d have warned Julie not to read those old love letters – but I thought a lot about the things left unsaid and the answers we’ll never know.
The final mystery was that little bag on the workbench. Who put those things in there? Why was it there?
It is, I suppose, a writer’s crutch to assign such significance to such a small thing. It was, certainly, a crutch of sorts for an Army brat who grew up in a house of repressed emotions. For the first time I wondered about her childhood dreams and tried to guess what she’d think of where she ended up.
Her memory care facility was in Whitesboro, just down the road from a doublewide trailer that flew the Confederate flag for a good while. It’s a damn far piece from Hyde Park in Austin. Cows graze in the field across the street.
Whitesboro wasn’t our first choice. We had originally put Mom in a much fancier urban facility in Frisco until it became clear that the care there wasn’t what Mom required.
Still, my sense of guilt remained until Jule shared a picture of one of Mom’s caretakers with her.
The love there was unmistakable. Not just from the caretaker, but from Mom as well.
In her final days, there was a steady flow of visitors to her room. The caretaker I had seen in the photo stayed for an hour and held her hand and wept. All these people were there for her, just as they had been there for her. She was loved and cared for.
Yes, she died in the shadow of Oklahoma, far removed from her youthful dreams. But, somehow, in a far-traveled life, she ended up where she needed to be.