Happy Mother's Day Again, Mom

This is my mother, Opal Dane McCourry Smith, in the 1970s.
The red was always there. So was the elegance.

I am embarrassed to say I'm not sure how long Mom has been gone now, but it has been about 25 years. She went slowly and quietly, moving aside her oxygen tank long enough to smoke half a Kool. The emphysema and the craving for a cigarette seemed to be equally uncomfortable for her. 

Hers was an age when most American adults smoked and she preferred Kool because that's what she could get during World War II. The soldiers got the best brands, she said, and so she couldn't resent that. They didn't want that dang menthol taste. Dad smoked unfiltered Chesterfield, a real man's cigarette, a soldier's cigarette, one that would burn out your lungs in short order, but it cooled nerves in battle, which he never saw. Capt. Smith was head of a munitions depot in Oregon where the men smoked Chesterfield.

Mom's cigarette habit (she never admitted to an addiction) was odd in that she rarely smoked more than five a day and only smoked half of each one, often putting them back in her purse for later when she took the fire off the end. Always frugal. Waste not ...

Dad became an alcoholic with the combination of college (rare in those days) and the military. Ultimately it ruined him, then killed him slowly. Mom never drank. She saw what it could do, first-hand. I gave her a first and last drink one evening when I brought a bottle of red wine to her house and offered her a drink. "Hmmmm," she said. "Yes. Let me see what the fuss is all about." She liked it. She declined a second drink.

Mom was always a pragmatist and Dad, a truly smart man, said she was "the smartest woman I ever knew." She didn't get that in school because she dropped out in the 9th grade. But she read, she talked, she listened, she discussed, she figured things out. She kept the family going after Dad died and left us with nothing. She nearly worried herself to death at times, but she always came through.

She developed a whole series of mental illnesses from being bipolar to agoraphobia (a fear of going out). She lived with them, was treated for them (sometimes in ways I've considered to be crude and cruel, like shock treatment). She persevered, she taught us values we still carry, she laughed out loud and cracked the most absurd jokes, even when she was depressed. 

The title of my memoir, "Burning the Furniture," comes from a statement she always made when the bill collectors lined up and we couldn't afford the rent, the electricity, the water, the phone. "If we have to move again, I'm burning the furniture," she said in that droll monotone that cracked us all up, even as we were carrying the furniture outside to put on the borrowed pickup truck, moving to yet another drafty old house in a low-end neighborhood.

But we survived. Because of Mom. Always because of Mom.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom. I hope things are better where you are than they were here.