Sacramento, 23 June 2012

Yesterday we had a funeral for our brilliant mother, who passed away on January 16 from complications due to Alzheimer’s disease. My brother and sister (Kevin and Kelly) and I were all sort of bemoaning the fact that it took us so long to get this particular act together, and we’re not at all uncertain it didn’t have to do with sheer exhaustion following from our Dad’s (their father, my step-father) passing last July. Whatever the case, it was a beautiful day, and an intimate gathering. It took place at St. Martin’s church in Davis, where my brother and his wife (Cindy) are members; Fr. Mark Allen presided. Cindy and Rylan (Cindy’s nephew) read the lessons, Joseph Farrow (Kelly’s ex-husband) gave a moving tribute, Kelly brought two lovely photos of Mother–one from her youth and the other from my first mass, I preached, and at the end read the Mourner’s Kaddish, to honor Mother’s near-conversion to reform Judaism.  This is Stephanie (Cindy’s sister), Cindy, Kelly and Joey (Joseph).  That’s me preaching. Here is the text of my sermon. I will return to regular posts in line with the Revised Common Lectionary next week. Thanks for bearing with us through this difficult year.

Who’d a thunk it … who’d a thunk it … that’s what I kept mumbling to myself walking through the Philadelphia airport Thursday. Who would ever have thought I would preach at my own mother’s funeral? But then again, it seems sort of like the right thing to happen, one last time for little Ricky to put on a show for Mother. Marcia Jane Hinds was a child of God who was close to God, who did not live a life of conventional churchgoing faith, but who knew God in her heart and lived as God called her to do, and furthermore she knew that was what she was doing.

Marcia Jane Hinds Smiraglia was the vibraphone player in Billy Hill’s TwinTones in Peoria in the late 1940s … and soon found herself playing in jazz clubs in lower Manhattan and in Harlem … she played a mean vibes, and if you ever knew that little happy noise she made,

kind of an inhalation over the lower teeth with a big smile, that was her ecstatic musical noise learned when she played jazz with the big boys, Tal Farlow, and Sal Salvador (my father), and even in the circles of Lerner and Lowe and Rodgers and Hammerstein, My Mommy, used to play jazz all night in Harlem!

In 1986 I went to teach at Columbia University and later at Long Island University. My friend Mac lived in the building where I probably was conceived, when I described it to her on the phone she said “oh yes, that’s were we lived then, you could see Grant’s Tomb.” I was born at Queens County Hospital in Jamaica, it has a different name today, but you still go past it on the Long Island Rail Road …. she would laugh when I told her about that. She didn’t like Queens but after she quit playing, which she had to do after she got too pregnant not even the bank jobs she was so good at were enough to afford an apartment in Manhattan.

Our mother lived a long and pretty much happy life. In the end Alzheimers’ took her memory but never her smileor her charm. I have been as torn about this homily as I was about writing the blogpost I wrote after she died. Everybody here knows our Dad died last summer, on the 4th of July. I wrote his blogpost complete with photos, that night. I knew right away what to say. Mother was different. When I told my priest friend Bill about this he said simply enough “mothers are different.” He was right. It was harder, because she was my cause, and she was my raison-d’etre and she was my … Mommy. It’s that simple. How does a grown man, old himself, deal with the loss of his Mommy?

As I wrote in that blogpost, I was born premature, I couldn’t suckle and I couldn’t breathe. I had to be kept in an incubator for six weeks. Aunt Margo, Mother’s older sister, was there and they took turns lifting me out of the incubator and making me eat. Funny isn’t it, now, to think there was ever a time when I couldn’t eat? Mother put her heart and soul into it.

I never knew much about her life with Sal. She never talked about it much. But when it was too late, and I started looking through the photos of her marriage and those big family dinners in Massachusetts and especially that Christmas card she wrote home about the state of the world in 1950, then I had to cry again, just to think how someone in that kind of a time, isolated from her mother and her sisters, dealt with having a baby in New York City. Thank goodness Aunt Margo was there for her.

Mother felt like a part of the world, always, and she taught me that. I have never been a citizen of my neighborhood more than a citizen of the world. Her pain at the death of her high school classmates on the beaches at Normandy was palpable even thirty, forty years later.

She taught me that all of us are here together. She did it by sitting with me on the sofa, feet entwined, 1960s television was our hearth, babies in the other room sleeping or needing attention. That would be Kevin and Kelly.

She became Marcia Jane Hinds Hanks when she married our Dad in 1968. She and I took the Santa Fe Super Chief from Chilicothe Illinois to Los Angeles and then somehow got to San Diego where I was the ring bearer and they were married. Dad was like a knight in shining armor. Along with Dad came a whole new family, Kevin and Kelly, even additional grandparents. We had a pretty conventional life for a navy family I guess.

A decade later I went off to college, to Germany, to graduate school, to my own life.

During this time we talked once or twice a week by phone. I remember trying to talk to her from the post office in Berlin in 1973, and I remember trying that subterfuge where you make a collect call and hang up. She couldn’t do it! The operator would say: “Collect call from Rick” and she was supposed to say “I don’t accept it” but she couldn’t … she’d always say “Are you okay?” The operators always let her get away with it though.

She was a woman who knew great love, and therefore a woman who loved greatly. And all of us know that. She never lost her joy in our relationship until the very end. Even at the end when I called she would get excited. In the early days of my work in Amsterdam she loved when I would call her at night and she could hear the trams, and the sirens ….. and we would talk about how romantic it all was. When I went to Paris to work for the first time she told me all about how to go to Gard-du-Nord. When I went to the Jack Ford bridge at Nijmegen I called her. When I went to Arnhem and walked to the Rijn and looked at the forest I called her. And I knew she was reliving those days of the end of World War II. I’m just sorry I never got to call her from Madrid or Granada to talk about Hemingway and Spain after Franco.

The scripture we have heard is all about the eternity of God and the eternity of God’s people. Mother was always right in the thick of that. “As the deer longs for the water brooks, so longs my soul for you O God.” From the Lamentations: “God is good to those who seek God;” From the Revelation, “Who are these?” They are those who have come out of the great tribulation. Well, that’s life isn’t it? And she not only has come out of that tribulation now, but she has shown us how to do it to. Jesus said: “In my house, there are many dwelling places.” That’s pretty much a description of our mother’s heart. She had many dwelling places in her heart, enough for each of those whom she loved.

I guess you all know that our mother was the grand-daughter of a Methodist circuit-riding pastor, The Rev. Erasmus Capp. So I expect that as a little girl she heard rather a lot of stories from the Bible. And our mother was a twin, second-born, identical twins they were,

Marilyn and Marcia. Some time after her divorce from our Dad, our mother decided to become Jewish. She got so serious about it that she once told me I needed to be tested for Tay-Sachs. She had us all figured out according to the twelve tribes, so of course, it was no surprise to her when I heard the call to become a priest–she said “you are of the tribe of Levi.” She moved to Israel for awhile, painting in a garret (or a hostel, what do I know?) until she got picked up for photographing sexy soldiers. Later we all learned she had changed her name to Jacob. We didn’t know why, and when we asked she just smiled and changed the subject.

And then, one day, in about the second week of seminary, I went to my Old Testament class, and … well, let me tell you a story, using words from Genesis:

Genesis 25:19-28

These are the descendants of Isaac, Abraham’s son: Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac was forty years old when he married Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel the Aramean of Paddan-aram, sister of Laban the Aramean. Isaac prayed to the LORD for his wife, because she was barren; and the LORD granted his prayer, and his wife Rebekah conceived. The children struggled together within her; and she said, “If it is to be this way, why do I live?” So she went to inquire of the LORD. And the LORD said to her, “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger.” When her time to give birth was at hand, there were twins in her womb. The first came out red, all his body like a hairy mantle; so they named him Esau. Afterward his brother came out, with his hand gripping Esau’s heel; so he was named Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when she bore them. When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents. Isaac loved Esau, because he was fond of game; but Rebekah loved Jacob.

I was so excited I could hardly stand it! I ran to my apartment and called her. I said “I know, I know” and she said “umm, what?” and I said I know where you got your name. And she said “oh you do, do you” and then I read, “afterward his brother came out with his hand gripping Esau’s heel, so he was named Jacob” and she laughed.” So then we talked about how she had felt all her life being the second twin. Funny how life works out that way.

So, I’ve taken enough time here. Mommy, Mother, I loved you from the moment you gave me life. I know Kevin and Kelly did too. Go with God mommy, Go with God.

My Mommy

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 ….