The age of knowing yourself

Oct. 14, 2004

Dear Leslie,

The last time I told someone how old my mother is she made me promise to stop. She just can't imagine anyone as young as she is being that old.

Mom still sings with a jazz band. She works out at a gym. She roots for the Cardinals and most everyone.

But she has become quirkily more herself with age. She wants what she wants. You know the poem, "Warning -- When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple?" My mother has been wearing purple and blazing red chiffon and sequined dresses most of her life. In the 1950s and 1960s she sang with a trio called the Mama-nettes. They rehearsed with a record player. "Sincerely ... Oh you know how I love you," they'd harmonize.

They were the Cape Girardeau version of the McGuire Sisters. In one show they dressed in ruffles and headdresses a la Carmen Miranda.

On the mornings they performed on "The Breakfast Show" on KFVS12, she first took my brother, sister and me to our granny's house in our pajamas. The other women in the trio, Virginia Boren and Virginia Hill, were like our other mothers. They sang, we watched on TV. My parents have a home movie of all the trio's children appearing on the show, squinting at the lights in our Easter clothes.

That was my mother's life on stage. Otherwise she seemed like everyone else's mom.

That was then. Now she not only wears what she wants, glittery as ever, she does and says whatever she wants. In the summer she goes to the river to watch the sun set with friends and then home to watch the Cardinals play. That's a sweet day. Weekends she's crooning "My Funny Valentine" to ballroom dancers.

When dissatisfied by a substandard movie or a musical performance, she says so. She's not keen on modern music. She loves the jazz singer Diana Krall but mourns her musical marriage to Elvis Costello. Hip-hop? She wants to know what all the shouting's about.

It now takes her longer than I remember to order at a restaurant. Is the cole slaw made with vinegar or mayonnaise? It's important.

Maybe age simply makes people more discriminating. Or maybe through the freedom of age we remember what it was like to be very young and unconcerned with pretense. "When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools," said King Lear.

Indeed, why should any of us wait until reassured by age to be exactly who we are, to voice whatever we feel and to want what we want?

DC and I have been trying to help my parents find a one-story house to move into because the stairs in the house I grew up in seem to have steepened over the years.

Mom has one house-hunting rule: No ranch houses.

Looking for a one-story house that isn't a ranch in Cape Girardeau is almost an impossible mission.

One Saturday morning we found one and took my mother and father to see it. From a distance of 50 yards she proclaimed, "I don't like brown roofs." I kept on driving.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.