Friends Old, New, and Soon to Be,
Though it is often shouted at me from behind her closed bedroom door, I’m the happy father of a teenage daughter who tells me she loves me, something I consider a victory. But when she’s lying intertwined with my wife on our couch watching TV, I cannot help but consider the outsized importance of her mother relative to me. It’s hardly surprising. They knew one another for six days, to say nothing of the preceding nine months, before I got home from Afghanistan to meet the new person in our house. I’ve been doing my best at fathering ever since, but mothers are something altogether different, whether they are of blood or choice.
Here in the month that the card and balloon dealers have assigned as our time to do so, I am blessed to know a gracious plenty of the kinds of mothers upon whom we should reflect. But the art of mothering bears conscious consideration year-round, and I want you to know about a woman I think about the other eleven months, something that might mean more when I tell you she’s been gone from this world, though not my life, for twenty-two years.
Gayle Beasley Moore was the mother of one of my best friends in school, a man who followed her into teaching and is himself wrapping up thirty years of teaching high school English this year. I was thirty-one when she died in 2004, and now, at fifty-three, I am somehow but a year younger than she was when she passed. I’ll be damned if I can read my own words without thinking we both got robbed of her time on this earth.
“Miss Gayle” was the kind of mother who always had a house full of kids she treated as her own. She fed us and housed us and, most importantly, as we became teenagers and then college kids who came to visit even if the son who originally brought us all wasn’t there, listened to us. She was ceaselessly amused by, interested in, and supportive of a menagerie of boys and girls who came and went from her home on our own schedules, because, as near as I could tell (had I ever even stopped to consider it), there was never an inconvenient time or a bad reason to stop in and see Miss Gayle. At the elementary school where she taught, loving extra much the kids who needed it, I would walk into her classroom as I did her home, like I owned the place, because wherever she was, I never once wondered if I’d find love there. I think that’s as good an epitaph as she would have wanted, but I want to tell you a Miss Gayle story, my final one in fact.
In the summer of 2004, I had come home about a month before going to war for the first time. Miss Gayle was deep in fighting her own battle, a second or third round with Hodgkin’s. I wanted to see her, but I had a smallpox vaccination sore on my arm, the result of a requirement for deploying to Iraq. My mother prevailed upon me to call ahead for once, forgoing the surprise visit that always earned me the kind of hug I believed reserved solely for me, coupled with a Barnesville, Georgia-accented “Oh, dooorlin’! Come in here!” I was preoccupied with the possibility of coming combat and willfully blind to, maybe incapable of acknowledging, the notion that Miss Gayle might not survive the disease this time. I let her dissuade me from coming to see her, or even, as I suggested, coming to the end of her driveway to wave at her. I just assumed I would walk into her house at 255 McDuffie Drive some months in the future, a conquering hero with war stories to tell her. That’s not how it worked out, of course.
I need to be honest and tell you that, despite my mother’s best efforts, I’ve had an intermittent relationship with religious faith. I’m certainly proof that there are no atheists in foxholes, willing as I am to cut deals with the Almighty when explosive things are falling from the sky, but the rest of my life might leave the question in doubt. Nonetheless, on July 15, 2004, I sat straight up from a dead sleep in a Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, bunkbed, sucking air like someone had punched me in my gut. In a sense, I reckon someone did, though I did not know Miss Gayle had passed at that point. My diffident relationship with the church aside, I remain convinced the deeply devout Miss Gayle came by to check on me because that’s what Mamas do, they check on their babies, whether of choice or blood, one more time before they retire to their rest.
Those of us so blessed as I am, to have my own exceptional mother, to be married to another, and to have, or have had, an extravagance of mothers of choice, like my stepmother, aunts, grandmothers, cousins, and of course, Miss Gayle Moore, can lose sight of our riches. Mothers don’t demand much, they just love and do and give, and we beneficiaries assume and ask and take. One day is damned sure a paucity of thanks for that. Maybe we could all take a lesson from them and give back a little on the other 364 days of the year. It should be easy, for it’s a certainty they’ll keep offering an example for us to follow.
Yours,
Russell Worth Parker
Editor-in-Chief, Tom Beckbe Field Journal
