ALAN writes:

The worst day in my life occurred twenty years ago. It was the day my mother died.

She grew up in the 1920s-‘30s. Only rarely did she talk about those years. She remembered the very hot summers of the 1930s and how few toys children had to play with then. She had fond memories of being taken to visit an aunt and uncle at their home in the small coal-mining town of Pocahontas, Illinois, in the 1920s, when “Aunt Rosie” would select an unlucky chicken to be made into Sunday dinner. She also recalled leaving high school in order to get a job to help support the household.

But I believe the hardness of those years helped to determine her character. Pettiness, meanness, neglect — she never knew what those things were because there was no trace of them in her character.

She carried with her throughout her life a perfectly-calibrated measure of proportion and perspective and the interior restraint that prevented her from doing anything to excess. Moderation and self-discipline were built into her character. She never aimed too high. She never sought or expected something for nothing.

Watch actress Janet Gaynor singing “Keep Your Sunny Side Up” in the 1929 motion picture “Sunny Side Up.” She projects in that memorable performance the same sense of life that I saw in my mother’s character.

She never concerned herself with ideas, philosophy, or public policy matters. She had more important things to do — properly.  She and I never talked at length about ideas, with one exception: One night in the 1980s we talked briefly about crime and punishment and the difference between private enterprise and government force. The judgments she expressed in that much-too-brief conversation coincided exactly with convictions I had formed on the basis of my own experience and observations. That, along with many other things, made me realize that her sense of life and mine were the same.

She made three terrible mistaken judgments in her life, which are not my concern in this essay.

She looked upon the world of medicine and doctors with near-reverence. I doubt she could have suspected that much of medical science is Voodoo Science and that many doctors are seasoned liars and racketeers.

My mother was in her twenties in the 1940s when she enjoyed seeing musical plays at the St. Louis Municipal Opera in Forest Park. One day many years afterward, I walked through that park and stood above the tiers of seats on that hillside and tried to imagine how she felt when she was part of that audience and when the haunting melodies of “The Desert Song” and “One Alone” and “The Riff Song” filled that open-air theater on summer nights in the 1940s.

It is now late in my life, but seemingly-little things that I enjoyed because of my mother come alive in memory.

On television late one night in 1967 or ’68, I happened by chance to see for the first time the classic 1940 motion picture “The Shop Around the Corner,” in which actor James Stewart was the main character.  Of all the old movies I discovered on “The Late Show” in those years, there were a few that I could never forget, and it was one of them.

My mother and I were passengers on a tour bus that drove right in front of the home where Mr. Stewart and his family lived, on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills. She took a color slide at that moment. I was ten years old on that sunny day in June 1960. That vacation trip to warm and beautiful Southern California was just one of a thousand benefactions my mother made possible.

Throughout my boyhood, I had the benefit of reading two daily newspapers that were delivered to our home. All the articles I read about baseball, dozens of articles about astronomy and space exploration that I clipped and saved in the 1960s, the wonderful color rotogravure sections every weekend that I read while sprawled on our living room floor, and the comic strips that I read daily:  Charlie Brown, Lolly, and Freddie in the morning paper, Blondie, Hi and Lois, and Andy Capp in the afternoon paper, and the color comics pages in the weekend papers.  And all of that never cost me a penny.

And then there was the simple (!!) matter of how to speak. I cannot remember my mother ever being loud or wanting to be loud. Even late in her life at family reunions, loud people annoyed her. It was alien to her character and sense of life.   I took that for granted during my boyhood years because I was seldom exposed to grown-ups who were loud. I inherited her distaste for loudness, and the profusion of loudness and loud people in modern life has always been insufferable to me. (As insufferable, I like to think, as loudness was to Arthur Schopenhauer, whose 1851 essay “On Noise” I have long regarded as the quintessence of good judgment.)

I had the good fortune to be born healthy—and kept that way throughout boyhood because of her devotion.  A clean, warm home, freshly-ironed clothes,  plenty to eat, and a home life that inspired trust, confidence, and optimism—none of those things landed there out of the blue; my mother put them there. Of course I made the terrible mistake of taking her for granted.

In the later years of her life, she found less and less to enjoy on television. She knew that TV programming in the 1990s was a far cry from the years of Perry Como, Loretta Young, and Andy Williams. She thought most TV shows in the 1990s were nothing but junk or silliness. Of course I agreed.  She thought that much modern “music” was just noise. “Oh, I can’t agree with that,” I said to her, “because I don’t believe it is nearly that good.”  She laughed and agreed.

She would be horrified by how Americans today dress, act, and speak in public places.

Only later in her life did I realize that people like her are not the dominant tribe in this country or on this planet.  By comparison, I looked around and saw how many other kinds of mothers treated their children. It did not impress me favorably; it appalled me.

If my mother made three costly misjudgments in a thousand or more decisions that she confronted during her life, I would consider myself the beneficiary of outrageous good fortune. And for that, I owed her my eternal gratitude and love.

— Comments —

Shannon Hood writes:

I am curious why Alan mentioned that your mother “never concerned herself with ideas” — as though eschewing ideas was a way of life to aspire to. Do you consider ideas unworthy of a woman’s time and attention?

The mind feeds on ideas. Nourishment of the mind through knowledge and ideas is as vital as nourishing the body with food. As Charlotte Mason wrote, “The intellectual life, like every manner of spiritual life, has but one food whereby it lives and grows–the sustenance of living ideas.”

Laura writes:

Excellent point!

I will let Alan respond if he wishes.

In the meantime, let me just say that while obviously people have different capacities, talents and inclinations, every single human being, even those with extreme mental limitations, lives in a world of ideas and engages with ideas.

Perhaps — I don’t know — Alan meant that his mother had no interest in intellectual novelties or popular ideologies.

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