My mother passed away on January 16 of this year (2012). It was the morning after her 84th birthday. She had had Alzheimer’s disease for awhile, and had been in hospice since late last summer, so her passing was not unexpected. But I was surprised at the emotional impact on me. Last summer, on the 4th of July, my Dad passed away. That felt, at the time, sort of like a metaphysical punch to the gut. But, I wrote a passionate blog post about Dad, and I went to his funeral in South Carolina, and I joined my siblings (I called him “Dad” but he was not my father, rather my step-father, although he raised me from the age of 5½ ; my siblings—my brother Kevin and my sister Kelly—were his children with my mother, and they were born when I was 6 and 7 years old. At any rate, Mother, Dad, Kevin, Kelly, and me, were a nuclear family. And we went through a major part of the history of the 20th century together as a family, even after Mother and Dad were divorced and Dad remarried. Oddly, or perhaps interestingly, they died within six months of each other.
But this is about my mother. The day she died, my brother phoned me and my sister emailed me. They were having trouble reaching me because I was on an airplane flying from Amsterdam to Philadelphia. But I knew already, because of something that happened on the evening of the 15th in Amsterdam. At any rate, the next email I sent to Kevin and Kelly said “I need to grieve my Mommy.” They were both sort of shocked, because they had never heard me refer to her in any terms other than “Mother.” Well, proper little gay boy that I was, I had given her that promotion from Mommy to Mother when the “kids” were born. It was so she could be their mommy, while I could go on to be the responsible 8 year old I was.
My mother was born Marcia Jane Hinds, in Moberley Missouri, on January 15, 1928. She was the second born of identical twins. Her sister Marilyn was born several minutes before her, but I never heard any family lore about the birth being difficult. Their parents were my grandmother—Margaret Ruth Capp Hinds—my parishioners have heard about Grandma in sermons about how her immense power was for me a sign of God, and my doctoral students have heard about how she influenced me at an early age to become a scholar—and their father, whose name was Merwyn C. Hinds. I’m sorry I don’t know what the “C” stood for, except I do know that his father’s name was “Warren Coleman Hinds” so perhaps that’s a clue. His nickname was “Jack,” and he sold turtle candies through the second world war, when his family was living in Pekin, Illinois. Mother and her older twin Marilyn Jean grew up with their older sister Marguerite (aka “Margo”). They all had gone off to what now is Illinois State University in Bloomington—then it was called Illinois Wesleyan or something like that. Margo graduated, but “Jack” died in the year in which she graduated, so Marcia and Marilyn had to leave their beloved sorority “Kappa Kappa Gamma” and move home to Pekin and get jobs. To this day my husband marvels at how I wrap Christmas presents, and I tell him every year that after Grampa Jack died Marcia and Marilyn got jobs at the big department store in Peoria, whatever it was called then, wrapping gifts. And they both knew great tricks, and they both taught me all of them.
At this point, before I go on, I need to acknowledge that I’m working mostly from my baby book (and I’ve exhausted that source now) and from memory (and I’m getting up there chronologically, as they say), so I hope I don’t make anything up. The one thing we can all be sure of was, she was my mommy.
Somehow or other, she married Sal Salvador. He was a pretty famous guitarist, who played in the early 1950s with Stan Kenton, then had his own band and record label for awhile. According to Aunt Margo, he left Kenton because he was afraid to fly on planes but I don’t whether that’s true. At any rate, his real name was Silvio Carl Smiraglia, his mother was Virginia Fain and his father was Salvatore Smiraglia. The legend was that they met on the ship heading for New York, but all I know for sure is that my father was born in Monson, Massachussetts, which seems to be a suburb of Boston. Sometime around 1948 he and my mother were married.
I have tried mightily to illustrate this post with photos but WordPress just won’t work with me, so all of the photos are in a bunch at the end. I’m sorry.
Look at what a handsome and capable lady she was, and also look at how she tried to fit into this strange Italian family. Well, Sal played guitar and mother played the vibes, she played in a group with Tal Farlow, a famous jazz percussionist of that era, but I don’t know the details.
I just know that after I was born, she and Sal were quickly divorced, and she and I moved back to Illinois to live with her mother (“Grandma”). She eventually went to work for the draft board, which is how she met my dad, who was in the navy. But along the way she also played in a group with her sister and her husband Billy Hill (Willis Hill was his real name), who was a pretty serious star in the Peoria music world for decades. Here is a photo of the “Twin Tones Trio” from a 1989 Peoria Journal Star retrospective about Uncle Bill.
That’s my mommy on the left and Aunt Marilyn in the middle. It was always strange to us growing up that people couldn’t seem to tell them apart. What do you think? Do they look alike? Of course, like most twins, they had learned as children to pretend to be each other to confuse people. I only saw them do it once, but it was pretty brilliant. It was in Hawaii, in about 1964 or so, and the neighbor (Corky Siegel was his name) walked up to the car in which we kids were sitting with Aunt Marilyn. Mother and Dad were in the commissary buying groceries (probably vodka and cigarettes). He said “Hi Marsh” and Aunt Marilyn didn’t miss a beat she said “Hi Corky” and they had a great chat while all of us in the back seat were giggling. When Dad and mom came back to the car, Dad introduced mother as Aunt Marilyn and we giggled some more and Corky never did figure it out. I never did get it though, they didn’t look alike at all to me, and even in this picture they don’t. Oh well. But I did love Aunt Marilyn, she was wonderful.
Well, what else to say? My mother was a brilliant woman. She should have finished college and gone to grad school. She just never got the chance. Later, after she divorced Dad, she tried to go back to the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies, to finish her BA and work on a masters. For some reason it didn’t work out for her. I think, since I was in graduate school at the time working on my first masters, I really couldn’t understand what has happening to and for her. But she was brilliant. She took writing classes from the “Famous Writers’ School” by correspondence back in the early 1960s, and she wrote scripts for the television program “Combat” that weren’t bought, but the producers actually read them and gave her advice. She was insulted and couldn’t get past the review stage. I have to laugh sometimes when I get rude peer-reviews from colleagues. I have to choke it up and make the changes If I want to get published. I guess I learned that from her experience. I wrote my first books (2) on the Smith Corona she used to write those scripts, which she gave me when I went to Indiana to grad school. And when I bought my first computer, which I needed to finish my 3-5 books, I used some of the money Aunt Marilyn had had in her “escape” fund, which she left to Mother when she committed suicide. So everybody who saw the dedication in those books to “MJMJ” and thought it was marijuana was wrong—it was to the greatest twins ever—Marcia Jane and Marilyn Jean.”
But I digress. She was my mommy. And even though she always worked, she loved us, she was a terrific mother, sort of. She was no June Cleaver, but she did her best. She loved us, and she cared for us to the end. When we were little I was not only firstborn, but always sick, and that’s why my siblings thought I was the favorite-it was just that I almost died at birth and she was always afraid after that.
But I was amused as we all grew up that she turned her allegiance to Kelly, especially at the end, and I think that had something to do with identifying with how difficult it is to be a confident, competent, grown woman. Well, whatever ….
Mother was brilliant … at 12 I had read along with her all of Hemingway, and I had learned the ways of the old man and the sea, and the trials of the Spanish civil war (and I just was in Spain a few weeks ago, soaking up what she taught me). She had lost most of her high school friends at Dunkirk, and she never got over that (which is why I went to Nijmegen on my first trip to the Netherlands), also she identified with the Jews of the holocaust, and toward the end of her cognizant life she tried to convert to Judaism.
But she also suffered from depression and paranoia all of her life. My brother and sister remember when I was a teen and I started going out at night in “the CAR.” I would get home at whatever time, with them all in their beds, and as I came through the front door she would call out “is the car OK?” … Yes mother … and then, “were they nice to you?”
I wish I had known then what I figured out later, maybe we could have gotten her help, but the world just wasn’t put together that way in those days. At any rate, she coped as best she could. But after her divorce she became increasingly isolated, and that wasn’t good for her. We were all excited when she came to my ordinations, the pictures here are from my priesting in 1998. Doesn’t she look great? This is the mommy I remember. She smiled, she loved me, she loved to hug me. Mommy I miss you.
Mostly, now, I remember the mommy who sat at one end of the couch watching “Combat” as I sat at the other end doing my homework, our feet intertwined. I remember the mommy who made me soft-boiled eggs and toast when I had to stay home from school sick. I find myself after 40 years of Cheerios, wanting my soft-boiled eggs on stress days. I remember my mommy who loved talking with me. I miss talking with her, even though that ended years ago when the Alzheimer’s took over.
So let’s focus on these brilliant pictures of my brilliant mommy, on the day her son became a priest. If you can figure out what WordPress has done here, you can see her with Kevin, my brother, after my first mass. I walked all over Center City the night before, by the way, to find a rose!
I see it has added the photos three times. Well knock yourselves out while I try to figure out how to edit that.
Please look at the beautiful Christmas card–photo of her and Sal, from 1950, and her note on the back of it. What a time; she was worried about the world. My. How things change.
Oh right the names: she was born Marcia Jane Hinds (we always said “Marsha” not Mar-see-ya). She was married to my Father, which made her Marcia Smiraglia; then divorced and married to my Dad, which made her Marcia Hanks, and then she changed her name to Jacob. In Facebook I wrote: Marcia Jane Hinds Smiraglia Hanks Jacob ….
Dimensions of Reality: glbt Christian spirituality 