For Mothers’ Day, 2017: excerpts from BERNICE AND JOHN: FINALLY MEETING
YOUR PARENTS WHO DIED A LONG TIME AGO.
At the age of
about two and a half, I had a question for my mother, a question that went
un-answered except in a way that I now recognize as typical behavior of Lillian
Bernice Locke Janovy, a woman who could easily see right through anyone and who
seemed to carry a deep and cosmopolitan understanding of the world far beyond
our immediate surroundings, no matter where those surroundings were located.
The question itself was obviously one picked up from a stranger, although at
that age, and in that particular neighborhood, I doubt if I would have been
allowed to stray very far from home, and especially not so far as to encounter
strangers driving by asking for directions.
My mother
could have answered this question easily and gone on about whatever young
housewife duties she was performing at the time, but she didn’t. Instead, she
set into motion a chain of events that would shape the lives of her husband,
her son, and her as yet unborn, perhaps even unplanned, daughter. My question
was a simple one:
“Dis whar Nat
Terrio lib?”
She must have
looked at me with her special combination of curiosity and judgment that I saw
daily, once I grew old enough to recognize it for what it was, and thought “no,
Johnny, this is not where Nat Terrio lives; this is where we live.” I
don’t know what she actually said to me at the time, but shortly afterwards she
told my father “let’s get the hell out of here.” I was not to grow up in
Louisiana speaking Cajun.
.
.
.
Suddenly, it
seems, in this compression of memory and history, Bernice Janovy, crying almost
uncontrollably during the radio broadcast of a nuclear weapon dropped on
Nagasaki, and voting for Adlai Stephenson regardless of the hole in his shoe,
makes sense. And just as suddenly, I now understand that her reaction to my
question was simply one example of a cultural clash. Hidden away in Houma and
preserved only by the telling, it was a tiny, personal, inconsequential event,
but nevertheless a model for other events that would send the entire planet
into convulsion by the beginning of the third millennium. Cajuns were “the
other” just as surely as Japanese were then, and to many of my fellow Americans
Muslims are now, and I was not to be one.
.
.
.
No matter
where the site, my father posed her, or—a more likely explanation—she arranged
herself, in a stately, dignified, but interesting, way. So there she sits on a
rock, a 19-year old newlywed on the side of a dark slope somewhere in the
vicinity of Palo Dura Canyon, with two strange men in the background. These men
must be geologists, if not by profession then at heart, for they are bent over
in the near distance up the hill, collecting rocks, their rear ends facing the
camera. This picture thus shows a young lady maintaining her elegance even in
the company of asses. It would be nice to know how she did it because there are
plenty of times today when I think that in September of 1935 she’d solved a
pervasive, if not a truly monumental, problem for young women of all ages and
all times.
.
.
.
Aside from
birth and death certificates, and public school report cards, the only other
written record of my mother’s time on Earth is her college transcript. Years
after my sister Teresa and I left home, Lillian Bernice decided to go to
college, commuting to what is now University of Central Oklahoma to major in
English, knowing full well she’d never live long enough to graduate. She took
courses in history and literature until her cancer advanced to such a stage
that she was mostly bedridden. After that, she read, again mostly history and
literature, until—at the age of 46, a month before her 47th
birthday—she could no longer lift a book. Nobody ever asked my mother about her
childhood, her public school experiences, how she met her husband, what she did
with her time before her children were born, or what she thought of her own
parents. My maternal grandfather was gone by the time I was born, supposedly
dead of pneumonia, but there was never any particular sadness in any discussion
of Edgar Locke and my maternal grandmother never talked about him. He may have
been a rather ornery person; we all seem to have such grown-up brats in our
family, and one of my mother’s sisters certainly married one.
BERNICE AND JOHN is available on all e-readers.
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