Poor Mary Stories
September 21st, 2007
So yesterday’s memorial to my grandmother was pretty amazing. I think waiting three months after she died was lovely for having allowed time for reflection, for having let her not being there sink in a little. My parents collected stories from anyone who was willing to share a memory of my grandmother, and put them into a lovely booklet with a photo, and that wouldn’t have been possible if we’d been doing this in the days after she died. And it was meteorologically perfect: the skies opened up and poured down on us as we walked from the chapel to the grave to place flowers and sing happy birthday, and that felt just right, though in true New Mexico fashion we got an hour or two of lovely sunshine in the afternoon, which allowed my husband to take all the kids out from underfoot for a rousing game of four-square. That gave me a chance to become reacquainted with my cousins, surprised at how much I like them as adults, how I see things I have in common with them and recognize a sort of inheritance from this woman who made sure her kids had music lessons no matter how poor they were, who valued education and books and learning when sometimes just surviving must have seemed precarious.
Still, there was this faint theme underscoring stories, particularly from the relatives of my parents’ generation, that whenever they were having tough times, they had only to think of how much tougher my grandmother’s life had been. She was born in a shack in the Oklahoma Territory in 1907 and snow came in around the blanket they had stapled up for a door, she was the only one not sick in the 1918 flu pandemic and was thus responsible for chopping wood, getting water, feeding and caring for her family, when she and her husband left prospectless Oklahoma to go pick fruit in California (and she has remarked that the Dust Bowl was worse than portrayed in The Grapes of Wrath) her husband was tubercular, so she was doing the picking for both of them and her children were beaten up by the other children because, among the migrant pickers, Okies were at the bottom of the pecking order. It’s suggested they may have had to get to Albuquerque on foot, she, her husband, and two little boys, hoping the high, dry climate would be good for her husband’s tuberculosis. They had a daughter, and then she was widowed. And the famous story is how she’d walk across town just to ask if there was cleaning to do, and that if she complained to her own mother, the response she got was “You may think you’re badly off, but at least you don’t have to pay somebody to do your cleaning for you.”
All of these stories, the Poor Mary stories, make it sound as if her life were a rebuke: you complain because the air conditioning isn’t working in your car? Don’t you know your grandmother walked from California to New Mexico? How could you complain of lost video games when you’ve never had snow coming in around the door! But that just wasn’t what my grandmother was like. In fact she was very reluctant with the stories of her life. What those stories mean to me is that our inheritance is one of the tenacity of life, and of love. That the existence of all of us who are her descendants is owed to the strength she showed, the persistence and determination, her indomitable faith. Rather than invalidating the difficulties and frustrations of our lives, there’s a gentle reminder that we have undoubtedly inherited the strength and courage to endure much, much worse. And I suppose that I have used that strength and courage trying to get better as a wife and mother and writer instead of picking grapes, picking cotton, and I am grateful for that.
