Steven Schroeder | like a song
in memoriam Mary Schroeder (1929-2020)
My mother was born on the West Texas
edge of East Texas in one of those small
settlements where people passing through
from one life to another stopped because
they’d had enough and got a mind to stay.
The stars were so bright there they
stayed with you seems like forever,
like a song you can’t get out of your head,
and she could hear it her whole life.
Her mother taught me that strength has nothing to do
with size and next to nothing to do with power
and Mom learned that from her too.
Granny could coax any flower
to bloom anywhere because she called
every single one by name, and all
she had to do was say kittykitty
to have every cat in earshot at her feet
waiting for something good, same
as her garden. Mom always told me
her mother’s father was born
within the sound of Bow Bells
and he talked to her about parallel
universes when she was a little girl, told her
if you stretched out your arm you might be reaching
right through someone in the universe next door.
She never forgot this, and it gave her children
room to grow. Her father saw his father die
when he was four, killed when his horse stumbled
and rolled over him. He taught me to be at home
wherever you are but never let yourself be stuck
and he was always moving, like a river, even
when he settled down. He went where
the work was, and Granny made a home
for him and for my mother and her brother
wherever they perched for a moment
here or there before flying again.
My mother was baptized in a river in Mississippi
because the water had to be living,
and she was old enough to remember
the preacher holding her head under three times,
like the old Hank Williams song, but (thankyoujesus)
she came up three times too – dying enough
to see life whole and know it is a gift.
She got a diploma from a high school in Wichita Falls,
but she graduated from the school of that long flight
with her mother and her father and her brother
and always liked the school in Oklahoma where they
let her take two English classes instead of English and math
best. It made her mad when they made her take just one
English then summer algebra in Wichita Falls.
She missed a year of school somewhere along the line
and almost died, but she never dwelt on that. We
didn’t learn about her failing kidneys until
she had another brush with death years later.
My mother had a brother who she loved
because he got the joke and was always ready
to share it with anyone anywhere, just like Grandpa.
I have no idea what church Mom
and Dad were married in, but I know
they went to hear Gene Krupa on their first date,
and I remember driving them downtown in Amarillo
to hear Tony Bennett when Dad was dying.
Mom went to church with Dad and
brought me and my sisters along, and
that meant being Lutheran.
But she always said
the Baptists had better songs.
Mom was a bookkeeper, but she was also
a keeper of books. I often wondered if all that time
she spent working with numbers was a demonstration
that she really hadn’t needed that summer math class. She
could keep books with her eyes closed. But she
read books eyes wide open and was known
among librarians for the big bags full she carried home.
She knew books were wings and encouraged her children to fly.
She was Postmaster at Boys Ranch, and
she was a quilt maker and she was a dress maker
and she was a hospice volunteer. And she loved to hear
her pastor go on about some Greek word in Bible study and
to hear the organ play in church on Sunday and to sit with her dogs
and her cats and her books and to watch the world go by
and she could arrange a beautiful bouquet from
even the most forlorn armful of flowers.
I remember hours passing with one of us
sitting at the kitchen counter while the other cooked
and how those roles reversed as time went by and how she saw
right through politics to the heart of the matter
and how her heart was as good as they come
and how it carried us then and carries us
now no matter the distance doubled
and doubled again by a dance of death
that does not end and I can see stars like a song
I can’t get out of my head and still the universe dances
as though our lives depended on it, as though we had a mind
to stay and I can hear her say “just put me in a cardboard box and
float me down the river,” and the river flows as every river
flows into the sea and the sea does not overflow
and time is not the river but the sea
flowing like a city,
like a song.
Chicago
1 January 2021
