Stuff That I Have Noticed #28 Lucy Mae
Near the tiny town of Glade Spring on a small south western Virginia farm in 1905 was born Lucy May Virginia Eller, the second of what would turn out to be nine children.
As a little girl she had a pet pig who grew up to be, alas, dinner. (Remember, it was a farm.)
Amazingly – for that time and place – her Mother fought her Father tooth and nail to see that she and her siblings all finished high school. (One brother even finished college!)
As late as when I was a kid in the 1940s the house she was raised in and her folks, “Papa” Pete and “Mama” Rachel, still occupied had neither electricity nor running water.
As a child she brushed her teeth with a twig from a birch tree or a privet hedge. When she died she had them all and just one filling.
She walked three miles round trip to school sometimes in two feet of snow.
As soon as she could she left home and moved fifteen miles to the big twin-city, Bristol Virginia/Tennessee, population 20,000 and became a long-distance telephone operator.
My Mom at her Switchboard (Age 47)
There she met a young hot-wire lineman, Benjamin Bishop Bryant and at the ripe old age of twenty-five – having been promised that alcohol would never again pass his lips – she married him.
Bish became a deacon and Lucy was the lead soprano (though never a soloist) in the Baptist church choir. She had an amazing voice and could pop a crystalline high C with no effort.
I was brought into the world five years after they married. They had no more children and I became Lucy’s life work.
My earliest memories of my Mom are of her reading to me from Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible. This was a children’s book, with pictures, wherein the many fables and historical tales of pillage, revenge, slaughter and adultery were simplified and elaborated for the young christian recruit. Lucy read with great dramatic flair, acting out the dialogue and investing the descriptions with intensity and presence. As she read she would point out certain words and coach me on the sounds of the various letters and by the time I started the first grade at six I could read. (There was no kindergarten in 1940s Bristol.) Not only that, she taught me basic arithmetic, adding and subtracting, so I was way ahead of the game when I started school. And the early intellectual stimulation of the written word inculcated in me a lifetime love of reading. Yet another precious gift from Lucy.
That’s the good news about my early childhood.
My sweet Mother was over-protective to a fault. As an only child I spent a lot (most) of my preschool years either alone or with her. She had quit her job as a long-distance telephone operator and stayed home with me until I started school.
The only friend I had to pal around with was Harold Stouffle, the son of our next door neighbor. Harold was a hostile kid and wasn’t much of a friend. My only memories of him are 1) picking and eating unripe cherries – that made us sick – from the tree in his yard and 2) a rock fight in which he beaned me with a sharp stone causing copious blood letting and hysteria from my Mom.
In the summer the other boys from school showed up at the playground in the morning, played all day and went home for supper. Lucy, being hyper protective of her little Benny, would not let me do that. I had to be home for lunch and as it worked out I got at most three hours of unsupervised boy-time at the playground. The point is that my early childhood was … isolated.
Looking back, I don’t blame her for the lack of knowledge about the necessity of allowing her kid the opportunity to become socialized. She was doing the best she could and meant well. And this essay is about the good stuff of which there was an abundance.
And speaking of good stuff, one result, I believe, of this early isolation was my ability to be alone and like it. Another is my fierce independence and ability to figure things out for myself.
Maybe the most important (though unconscious) gift Lucy gave me is biological. She died in 2003 at almost ninety-eight and was mentally and physically healthy and strong as a plow-horse until about six months before she left us. She lived alone in Hollywood for forty years after my Dad’s early death at fifty three. The best example of her (and my) inherent toughness is best shown in a phone conversation we had about three years before her death.
“How you doin’ Mom?”
“Fine. I’m just a little stiff and sore.”
“Why are you stiff and sore?”
“I was standing on a chair changing a light bulb and I fell.”
The woman was ninety-four or five, she fell off while standing on a chair and was “a little stiff and sore.”!! My Mother gave me those genes. A couple of years ago (at eighty-two) while riding my bike down Broadway, I was “doored” by a guy getting out of a taxi. I flew over my handlebars, landing on my shoulder. I got up, accepted the very nervous looking guy’s apology and went on my way. I was “a little stiff and sore” for a couple of days.
Thank You for those genes, Lucy! (And for the singing voice.)
Ben & Lucy 1990s
One of the greatest frustrations of my life was my inability to have a fully adult, communicative relationship with my Mother. And the root of this blockage is religion. Lucy was a staunch, fundamentalist Baptist. In fact she was a literalist by which I mean that she believed that there was a place where the streets were paved in the substance that surrounds my ring finger and that one entered upon this thoroughfare through gates that were hewn from the substance comprising the string of precious beads she wore around her neck! I kid you not. Otherwise my Mom was an intelligent and reasonable person but she suffered from a very specific mental disorder engendered by that dread malady known as religion.
So the subject of my (and Elizabeth’s) Spiritual growth was not available for discussion and when I visited her in Hollywood, we went to church and I looked up scripture in my bible, sang the hymns and bowed my head in (what appeared to be) prayer.
Even with her “faults” my Mother was a good, kind, talented and smart woman and she did the best she could. The frustrations I experienced in our relationship were small potatoes when compared to the many lifelong gifts that Lucy May Virginia Eller (Bryant) bestowed upon me.
Thank you, Mom.
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