Oh, Mama, Who Did You Wish to the Devil? Editor’s Notebook

One of the possessions I inherited from my mother when she died was a book of “Grooks” by Piet Hein, written while in hiding during the Nazi occupation of Denmark.

In the book, Hein offers terse, witty aphorisms full of brutal honesty.

Of the dozens of short poems in the book, my mother marked two with an “X.” The first one I understand completely, as she died of a terminal illness:

A Maxim for Vikings

Here is a fact

     that should help you fight

           a bit longer:

Things that don’t act-

     ually kill you outright

           make you stronger.

I’ve been puzzled for years about the second:

An Ethical Grook

I see

     and I hear

           and I speak no evil.

I carry

     no malice

           within my breast.

Yet quite without

      wishing

           a man to the Devil

one may be

     permitted

           to hope for the best.

My mother, grace and dignity epitomized, wished someone to the devil?

I heard her swear exactly once. She said “damn.” I remember my sister and I sharing a “this is huge” eyroll, but saying nothing. She wasn’t given to shouting, or crying or outbursts of any kind.   

Whatever fire burned deeply enough for her to wish eternal damnation for someone or something, she kept to herself.

It’s not important that I know exactly what that was, except that it would help me to more fully know her. I had her for such a short time and have already outlived her by several years. It would have been nice to have known her many dimensions.

Here’s what I know for sure:

My mother was beautiful. She had eyes the size and color of buckeyes, silky brown hair and a figure until she died that never betrayed seven pregnancies. As a young woman, she could have been Judy Garland’s double, right down to the ruffled gingham dress. When she dressed to go to church or some other function, she wore a hat and gloves and carried a purse that matched her shoes.

She was, I’m told the publisher at the newspaper where she set linotype said without an ounce of degradation or insult intended, “a cute trick.” She set type faster and more accurately than anyone he’d ever seen, the story goes, routinely “hanging” three lines at a time.

Her life was hard. She raised the seven children resulting from those pregnancies, diapering one or more of us for a full 10 years without the benefit of disposable drawers – or even an automatic washer and dryer.

She grew enough vegetables in the garden and fruit in the orchard to keep us in strawberries, cherries, peaches, sweet corn, peas, green beans, pickles and pickled beets – oh, that woman pickled the best beets I’ve ever eaten – until the next crop matured.

I didn’t have a store-bought dress until I was on my own, and neither did my three sisters, but we were as fashionable as anyone in school and more so than many. 

She knit sweaters and blankets and even worked tiny knitting needles the size of matchsticks to knit the sleeves on my Barbie doll’s clothes. The click-click-click of her knitting needles was like a lullaby. When I hear someone knitting in a coffee shop – what's old is new again – it’s like being hurtled back in time.

As the story is told, she couldn’t cook when she married my father and buried failed jelly rolls and other kitchen experiments gone bad in the yard of the tiny house they shared in their first year of marriage after World War II ended.

She became a renowned cook in our small farming community and throughout the state of Missouri, where I grew up. She won the Missouri CowBelles cook-off once, but refused to wear the official CowBelles jumpsuits other women wore because she thought the getup was tacky.

She was right. The fabric was marked like cuts of beef, as anatomically correct as possible when marking the parts of a woman as one would the rump and arm roasts and various parts of a bovine. They were flattering to almost no one. 

If anyone could have pulled it off, my beautiful mother could have. But it wasn’t her style.

Perhaps the person who came up with that idea is who she wished to the devil, but I doubt it. It also wasn’t her style to waste emotions on something so trivial.

More likely it had something to do with what she gave up, her wish for damnation aimed not so much at a specific individual as at the expectation that she and other women of that era would give up their dreams without so much as a glance back or a thought of what might have been.

Happy Mother’s Day. We’ve come a long way, Mama.