My Mom and Me: The Early Years

My mother was born in 1923, and born at home on Dauphine Street in New Orleans. She was the fourth of six children, five girls and one boy. The house was located in the Ninth Ward of the city, an area of numerous vegetable gardens for the markets at the back of the French Quarter.

She was a beautiful child, and strongly favored by her father, who’d take her visiting to friends and to his various local haunts. The family had been fairly well off – her two oldest sisters had memories of wearing silk dresses – but then hit hard times. My mother did not know silk dresses. But she loved her family and had a special bond with both of her parents.

Her father died when she was 12. The Great Depression was still going strong, and her mother went to work as a cleaning lady in movie theaters. My mother can remember times when there was nothing in the house to eat, and what it meant to go to bed hungry.

She attended John McDonough High School, then an all-girls public school. And she did well, and loved Spanish (she was president of the Spanish Club) so much that she had her heart set on becoming a Spanish teacher. But life intervened. First came a romance with a football player for Holy Cross High School; the area where my mother grew up is still known today as the “Holy Cross District.” Then came World War II, and a quick wartime marriage that produced one son but didn’t survive the war.

She had worked through the war at the Port of Embarkation in New Orleans, which helped process military recruits for sending overseas. After the war, she continued to work, mostly as a secretary. She eventually landed as a secretary of a trade publisher for the shipping industry, where she worked for – my father. They were married in 1950.

My earliest memories of her date from about 1953 or 1954. And they’re associated with living in a duplex in suburban Jefferson Parish. I wasn’t exactly Dennis the Menace, but I was active and creative.

I thought the new sofa needed some color, so I added black shoe polish, a kind of early performance art.

I snuck the dog in the house, which was strictly verboten, and then had to hide him when I heard my mother come in. I was in the kitchen, so I found the most accessible place to hide him. The oven. (No, it wasn’t on.)

She wouldn’t let me play with her pots, so when she went to check on the clothes in the washing machine in the garage, I locked the screen door and proceeded to play with the pots. She had to get the neighbor next door to take the door off the hinges to get inside.

When she needed a break from her child, she’d vacuum. All it took was the first sound of the vacuum cleaner being turned on and I was on the sofa (the one with the shoe polish stains). She likes to vacuum to this day.

We moved to a new neighborhood when I was 4, and I vividly remember moving day, with my mother stationed in the new house while I rode with my father back to the old house to finish cleaning out the kitchen. I was worried, because our new house was next to woods. I remember asking my father if my mother would be okay with the bears.

Shortly after we moved in, she took driving lessons, so she could drive me to kindergarten at Mount Olive Lutheran School. She hated to drive, but the idea of all the bus transfer that she would have to make – and four times a day if she wanted to go back home – was too much. So she learned to drive, and sat in the driver’s seat exactly the same way for the next 45 years – upright posture, very proper, very serious and very attentive. But even after she learned to drive, she always preferred the bus or the “streetcar” – the New Olreans version of a trolley. Many times I remember riding with her on the bus into the city to see a movie at one of the four big downtown theaters – the Saenger, the Lowe’s State, the Joy and the RKO Orpheum. (The buildings are all still there but only the Saenger remains as a theater.)

My mother loved movies. She saw Gone with the Wind and the Wizard of Oz when they were first released. She loved all of the movies, but especially the epics and the romances. One day, she took me with her to see a movie called The Last Voyage with Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone, which was so full of tension that I cried through most of it. It was not a suitable movie for an 8-year-old.

Some mothers might have taken their distraught child to get ice cream cone or (in New Orleans) french doughnuts (beignets) at Café du Monde. Not my mother. She took her distraught child right across the street to the Joy Theater to see Some Like it Hot with Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe.

Of course, she got to see another movie on the same day. She would consider that a good day.


To see more posts on mothers, motherhood and Mother’s Day, please visit the blog carnival hosted by Bonnie Gray at Faith Barista.

Top Photograph: My mother with my grandson Cameron, June 9, 2010, New Orleans.

Bottom illustration: Canal Street, New Orleans, about 1930. Except for the cars, it looked much the same when my mother took me to the movies. The Saenger Theater is on the left and the Loew's State theater is on the right.

"Reading God as a Poem"

That's a title of a poem by Luci Shaw in her latest collection, Harvesting Fog: Poems. I talk about the poem and the creative imagination today in my first post for The Master's Artist. Take a look and let me know what you think.

It's Not an Electric Blanket

Back in the mid-1970s, a friend at work introduced me to the writings of Flannery O’Connor. I had heard of her but had never read any of her works. But the friend raved about her writing, and so I picked a paperback entitled “3 by Flannery O’Connor,” containing “Wise Blood,” “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “The Violent Bear It Away.” I read it, and I was hooked.

From there it was The Complete Stories, The Habit of Being and Mystery and Manners. And that pretty well covered the extent of her writing (she died in 1964). I loved her letters, full of wit and wisdom and priceless one-liners like “Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think universities stifle writers; I say, they don’t stifle enough of them.”

And she also said something that has stuck in my head for more than 30 years since I read it: people like to think of faith as a nice electric blanket, when it’s actually the cross.

In the chapter of Mere Christianity entitled “The Invasion,” C.S. Lewis makes the same point, when he talks about the view he calls “Christianity-and-water.” He describes it as the view “which simply says there is a good God in Heaven and everything is all right – leaving out all the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and hell and the devil, and the redemption.”

Christianity is not a simple religion. It is a religion, Lewis says, "you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.”

Try original sin – you mean babies are born sinful? Or redemption – how absurd is it that a man died to save the whole word, and died it by dying in the most vicious and humiliating way possible? And Paul and all those intolerant statements he makes? Seriously!

But that’s what it is. Christianity is about God’s love and about his wrath. If you doubt that, then read the Book of Revelation. Ah, but that wasn’t Jesus, some say, that was John – and he was obviously hallucinating or on drugs. Well, Jesus wasn’t exactly sweet, meek and gentle when he cleared the moneychangers out of the temple and called the Pharisees and priests a brood of vipers.

There are hard things about Christianity that Christians have to accept, even as it makes them nervous, uncomfortable and even aghast. It is not a simple religion. It is not an electric blanket. In fact, it’s downright difficult and not for cowards.

It is taking up the cross.


To see more posts on this chapter of Mere Christianity, please visit Sarah Salter at Living Between the Lines.

Lightning Bugs

I chased them
two-fisted
with open jars
and sometimes
hands, hoping
for glow on
demand, until I
understood that
their pilgrimage
lasted a lifetime
or but a moment,
flashing in trees,
hovering above
flowers in dusk,
illuminating hope.

This poem is submitted for One Shot Wednesday hosted by One Stop Poetry. To see more poems, please visit the site. The links will be live at 4 p.m. Central time today.

The Games I Don't Like to Play

As a child, I loved games, especially board games. A lot of the game I played as a kid are still around – Monopoly, Clue, The Game of Life, and Chutes and Ladders, not to mention Checkers and chess.

In 1976, my wife and I were this young couple living in Houston, and I was in the middle of a mystery reading binge -- Dashiell Hammett, Philip Marlowe, Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, G.K. Chesterton and his Father Brown stories, Dorothy Sayers, S.S. Van Dine and a lot more. One weekend night, we had a bunch of friends come over to play a mystery game. Now this was several years before someone dreamed up a “mystery game in a box” and, yes, I should have copyrighted the game I put together. But I wrote a mystery, worked out roles, developed clues and hid them all over our apartment. Each clue contained a clue to the next place to find a clue.

It was great fun, and people tripped all over each other (it wasn’t a big apartment). I don’t remember what the mystery was but I do remember who won – a lawyer and his wife. Everyone else ate and drank and socialized while they played the game; he went straight for the solution. It was a costume party as well, with Holmes and Watson, Charlie and Jimmy Chan, Nick and Nora Charles and a few others. (And we had prizes!)

Then, when we had kids, I played board games, card games, hide-and-go-seek games, and who knows what all else. My oldest was ultra-competitive (my oldest is still ultra-competitive) and so I had to make sure he won some and lost some. He hated losing. He still hates losing.

I’m not sure when I stopped playing or enjoying games. But I did. Perhaps it was when they became so serious. Like at work. I discovered games at work in my very first job after college graduation. I was amazed at how much some people would spend playing games in the office when they were supposed to be working. Of course, they tended to get the promotions, too. They had learned early on that games were important.

It’s a lesson I’ve never learned. Or, better said, it’s a lesson I refused to learn. About 30 years ago, I interviewed for a job in another part of the country, spending an entire day talking with the people I would be working with. When I got home, the headhunter who arranged it all called and asked me what I thought. “Well,” I said, “they’re very nice.” He pressed for more details. “I think they’re going to get their lunch eaten,” I said. “They really don’t have a good sense of who they are or what they’re doing.”

He laughed (and this was his client). “What kind of predatory instincts do you have?” he asked.

“I don’t,” I replied. “I know exactly what mean – that I could walk in there and even at my age run circles around them, and my boss wouldn’t know what hit him.”

“And you can’t do that?” he asked.

“Oh, I can do that,” I said. “I’m perfectly capable of doing that. But I can’t. I simply can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Both.”

He thought I was missing a great opportunity. He was right.

What he didn’t know was that I hated the games, and no opportunity was worth that.


To see more posts on games, please visit the One Word Blog Carnival hosted by Peter Pollock. The links will be live at 10 p.m. Central time tonight.

Photograph: Looking In by Peter Griffin via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Guest Post: “I Feel Like I Lost a Friend”

Mark Sutherland is a friend and colleague at work, who’s been known to wear kilts (but only on special occasions). A native of Scotland, Mark has lived in the U.S. since the 1980s. He recently wrote a children’s story, Why Do We Celebrate Easter, that I reviewed here back in February. Someone dropped the link to the review in Stumble Upon, and page views took off (more than 500 at last count).

Mark mentioned that he had just finished reading Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas, and sent me what is not so much a review but more of a meditation on how moved he was by the book. Mark said it was OK to share it, and here it is.

I Feel Like I’ve Lost a Friend

On a rare occasion I get so involved in a book that it becomes real to me. The characters come to life. The story envelops me with its mental imagery and emotion. And when you finish, it’s like emerging from another world that existed for only a short while.

And on an even rarer occasion, a book about real people does the same.

Yesterday, I finished reading Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas. Yesterday, I lost a friend who I won’t meet until eternity.

Bonhoeffer was a pastor in Germany, prior to and during World War II. He was an outspoken critic of the Nazis, and his criticism—and ultimately his actions—were driven by his understanding of Scripture and his convictions about God. He saw great evil in Hitler and his crew, even before Hitler came to power. And as Hitler destroyed the Germany Bonhoeffer loved, Bonhoeffer spoke against Hitler. He spoke and acted in defense of the Jews. He spoke and acted in defense of a biblically-based Church. He spoke and acted against the heretical church of the Third Reich.

And you can’t help but ask yourself the question about what would you do.

Are you passionate about God’s Church, to the point of standing against a tyrannical church-state partnership that wishes to redefine what you believe?

Are you so in love with the Word of God that you will stand against the popular, acceptable claims as to what it means, or are you willing to speak against those who twist God’s Word to fulfill their own desires and plans?

And are you so secure in your stand before God, that is based upon faith alone in sovereign plan of God that existed before time began that you would calmly face your execution in a way that impacted those who witnessed it for decades to come?

While you may not agree with everything Bonhoeffer stood for, his life is an example to us all. And his life, and death, should force us to go to Scripture to answer these questions and more.

I look forward to meeting Pastor Bonhoeffer when God calls me home. In the meantime, we have to be satisfied with an incredible biography that grips you like a novel and won’t let you go until you say goodbye to your new friend.

Thank you, Eric Metaxas, for writing this book. And thank you, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for living it.

The Desert Teaches

The desert teaches
a man to consider
a question as if
Socrates asked,
a request as if
a penitent submitted,
a plea as if
a drowning man begged.
I speak no word,
I make no motion,
I offer no riddle.
Find what you seek
by reading my lips.

This poem is submitted for One Shot Sunday, hosted by One Stop Poetry. To see other poems and read the interview with photographer Rosa Frei, please visit the site.

Photograph by Rosa Frei for One Stop Poetry. Used with permission.