St. Valentine

The first time my former husband was introduced to my mom was Valentine’s Day, 2002. Ricky and I had been dating long-distance for four months and he had made the 14-hour drive from Connecticut to North Carolina for our first calendar-and-cards-and-chocolates-certified day of romance. We were still new, especially having spent so little time in one another’s company. During those first four months and for the following eleven, most of our budding love happened on the phone. We would spend hours and hours and hours talking. He was smart, charming, and witty. I was creative, Southern, and giggly. What I remember most about those late-night conversations, aside from a phone that couldn’t last as long as we could talk, was the laughter.

It was poetic, given our monthly bills and calling card expenses, that Ricky would meet Mom in a similar fashion. Back then, just over 15 years ago, most of us university residence hall occupants did our telephone talking on a cordless landline. (For those unfamiliar with the term, imagine a telephone that does not Instaface your life and one that has to be returned to an actual base to recharge.) Those ancient boxes for conversation often came with a once revolutionary fixture called an answering machine. Even more unbelievable, people used to listen to their messages.

And so it was that while reviewing Valentine’s Day voices on a machine and in the company of my first “real” Valentine, we heard Mom begin to sing…

I just called to say I love you
I just called to say how much I care
I just called to say I love you
And I mean it from the bottom of my heart. 

Ricky was in love. With Mom.

Years later, I kept another of her tunes saved on my once revolutionary, though quickly outdated cellular telephone that was replaced only when there was no more entering the charger at an angle and on a prayer to catch a tiny boost that would take longer to complete than it would to run out. When that phone met its maker, Verizon, I lost the song. But for many a message check there was Mom, singing the words from a new coffee mug, a gift I sent for her 62^nd birthday. It was decorated with a memorable melody from one of her favorite television shows and after I entered my password, so was my voicemail…

Soft kitty
Warm kitty
Little ball of fur
Happy kitty
Sleepy kitty
Purr purr purr.

Mom’s voice and playfulness has a way of winning over the masses. That, and the world’s best biscuits. She has always done a little extra something to make us (and by “us” I mean everybody) feel special. One Christmas week dinner included individual pot pies, complete with our initials baked on top. She also initialed my clothes hangers that moved with me to college and snuck a card into a plastic tub she had filled with Nutri-Grain bars and mandarin oranges. To her, those were the staples of my post-secondary education.

Mom has sewn prom dresses and church dresses. She has hosted a friend who was in town when I was not, waking her up with blueberry muffins and coffee. She has rocked chickens to sleep and packed a birthing bag when her goats of yore, Laverne and Shirley, were expecting. (And yes, the first set of kids showed up as Lenny and Squiggy.) She has reminded any of us who have taunted her for her limited height that being short gives her good access to our kneecaps. She has called me “Punkin’” for as long as I can remember and I have christened her “Yo-Yo Ma.”

Others have known her as “Mama Liz.” They, the staff and inmates of the Cherokee County Jail, were as special to her as her own family during the years she spent as both a cook and an adopted mom. Many a morning found custom breakfasts awaiting tired deputies and overworked assistants. Judges and lawyers were gifted some of those previously mentioned world’s best biscuits. New Year’s Day greeted inmates with the traditional meal of black-eyed peas for luck, greens for money, and pork for prosperity. Super Bowl Sunday served pizza, wings, and ice cream for the big game, which those behind bars were permitted to watch. Easter morning delivered hard-boiled, dyed eggs. July 4^th offered banana splits. Labor Day brought hot dogs, hamburgers, potato salad, and baked beans. Christmas ended the year with beef roast, oven potatoes, yeast rolls, and red velvet cake. Some trustees who helped Mom in the kitchen never worried about socks or hugs. A few, on work release, even shared meals at our dining room table.

And when one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted was arrested in our little town and held in our county jail, Mom made sure he had clean clothes and food that would be light on his stomach. Charged and later pleading guilty to the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, the 1997 Atlanta bombings of an abortion clinic and a lesbian nightclub, and the 1998 bombing of the New Woman All Women Clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, Eric Robert Rudolph was a nationally-known murderer. Three people had died; twelve were injured. For seven years, Rudolph lived in hiding. While it is likely that he had some help along the way, it is also likely that he spent many of those days and nights looking for food, dry shelter, and warmth. When he was detained, Mom’s concern was his ability to eat food and keep it down. She knew his circumstances and thought to bake some recently donated trout, assuming that it might have been a familiar part of his menu in the North Carolina mountains. The next day she brought in homemade blackberry jam. It was something he likely had not tasted for a long, long, long time.

Every single one of these extra details has said to all of us, “You are a person and I love you.”

Sometimes it seems that she knows in advance when we need to hear it.

February 14, 2014 was one of those days. No matter my declaration that Valentine’s Day was an empty pit of superficiality and that I didn’t want or need a partner to take me out to dinner when I could treat myself and not have to debate sharing my bed later that evening, I did want to be loved. I wanted something. On what was not my first or only calendar-and-cards-and-chocolates-certified day of romance as a single woman, I still had the inclination to check the mail on my walk to the bus stop and was delighted to see a pink envelope sent from home. I held the card until I made it to my stop, sat down on the bench, and opened up another of Mom’s sneaky treats. Inside the “If everyone had a daughter like you” greeting was a $5 bill. In that moment of vulnerability, Mom had given me what support she could supply from afar. A card was no little gift. Neither was five dollars.

I debated all day what to do with my present. I considered a stop at Fido, one of my favorite spots on the walk home, where I could pick up a cookie or a piece of pie. I thought I might sip on a Chai latte and watch people in all stages of love. When I was a little more honest with myself, I debated contributing that Lincoln toward a bottle of wine and sipping away some looming sadness. Instead, I decided to carry the bill in my pocket and reach for it when I needed a reminder that I, too, was in a stage of love.

Four years later, that $5 bill still travels with me daily in the company of my rosary. Both are tucked in a gift from my sister, an accessory bag complete with an up-close-and-personal photo of a pig. And though I’m no longer Catholic and though I’m no longer single, I still reach for the beads and the bill…

And I remember.