Remembering Mom

We lost my Mom this spring, after she had lived a long, productive and generally happy life. As a high school English teacher she touched the lives of thousands of students, and her personality was the sort that made an impression. She had a way of speaking that made some people ask whether she was British or where she had picked up her “accent”; being a small-town Iowa girl she didn’t quite know how to answer. At last someone, I think an instructor at a course she took when she went back to college for her Master’s degree, told her, “I can identify your accent: it’s called ‘perfect diction’.” That brought on one of Mom’s hearty laughs. 

She was always a lover of learning and literature, of ideas and their clear expression. Sometimes while reading she would come upon a particularly well-constructed sentence and would share it with us so we could appreciate it with her. It might be a figure of speech or a turn of phrase that used language to exquisite effect, or some humorous play on words or juxtaposition of ideas that tickled her. The passive voice in Sinclair Lewis’s remark in Babbitt that “he was married by the first girl he met” delighted her, as did the expression “a bear of very little brain” in Winnie-the-Pooh. She would apply the latter to herself when she forgot something sometimes: she never took herself too seriously.

I had the good luck to attend my senior year in the same high school where she taught, and to have her as my English teacher. She introduced the teaching of composition with writing sentences, went on to paragraphs, and thence to essays. The many books we read for class provided topics for the essays. She taught us what I suppose they now call “critical thinking”, but I remember it being more substantial and useful than what I hear people saying of such instruction nowadays. For instance, when we read Steinbeck’s OF MICE AND MEN [spoiler ahead], she asked the class what we thought of the conclusion, where George kills his friend Lennie rather than let him be arrested and tried and executed. The students invariably would say George had done the right thing. She would invite discussion of the reasoning a bit, and then she would ask them what they would think and do if their next door neighbor were to kill a man. At this, the same students would gasp, and say that would be dreadful, and they would call the police at once. Then she would say, well, but what if the murdered man were simple-minded, like Lennie? Of course that would make no difference!, they would protest. She would add, one by one, the circumstances that they had only a moment earlier seriously argued had exculpated George, and the class rejecting each of them, would become thoughtful. Finally, she asked what tricks Steinbeck had used in his narrative that led them along to a viewpoint that in real life they strenuously reject: continually describing Lennie with comparisons to an animal, juxtaposing his murder with the story of the necessary killing of a beloved dog, and so on. By the end of the discussion, the class had grasped that Steinbeck had written a piece of propaganda that leads the reader along in a rather creepy way. It was exactly the sort of critical thinking that we need more of today.

In her college days Mom had come across St. Thomas Aquinas and had been impressed by his exposition of Catholic theology, which she felt had given her a religious experience. I hadn’t read anything of the Angelic Doctor back in high school, but I think Mom must have had the Summa Theologica in mind when she assigned us to write an essay of opinion, because she specified that we had to explain, fairly, the arguments that disagreed with our own, in the course of showing why our opinion was better. This was one of the essays I had to re-write for her. I chose to write on my opinion that astrology was bunk, and Mom wouldn’t accept my finished product because I had failed to give cogent arguments contradicting my opinion, to show that I had answers for them. 

“Arguments supporting astrology?” I protested. “But there aren’t any!” 

“No argument, no essay!” she shot back, and I had to choose another topic. I’ve thought of that “no argument, no essay” many times since, particularly since internet forums and social media have sometimes tempted me toward completely pointless repartee against ideas that haven’t the slightest justification. Why bother in such cases? If there’s nothing to be said for an idea, why bother knocking it down? If someone holds forth for an idea with NO rational basis, why try to reason them out of it? They’re obviously not going to be swayed by reason or they wouldn’t have that opinion in the first place. No argument, no essay.

I probably resist a good two-thirds of such arguments by remembering this.

There were a number of pithy quotations that Mom found relevant enough to raise them again and again her whole life. One was Edmund Burke’s “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”: she was keen on personal responsibility to stand up to bad guys. Another of her favorites was Henry David Thoreau’s “Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.”

And one of her all-time favorites was from Kahlil Gibran’s THE PROPHET: “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” The idea that there is a purpose to all suffering, and a blessing attached to it that we can receive in no other way, struck her as a deep truth. I believe it helped to sustain her during the long, and to her wearisome, years of her declining health.

She was a bear of a very good brain, indeed.