Though Mother’s Days are usually spent apart from my mother, there is no denying her presence this Sunday as my children and I gather in Texas for my older son’s receiving his music degree with honors. Mother’s legacy of appreciating music, arts and academics continues with her grandchildren.
Evelyn Simpson Talley is a child of the Great Depression, born in the heart of New Orleans but reared on a farm between Lake Pontchartrain’s north shore and Mississippi. She studied by kerosene lamp and practiced her high school trumpet in the barn with the cows because the blaring disturbed her father. She and my father were childhood friends at the one-room country schoolhouse. By the time they were riding the bus into town for high school, the very same high school I attended, they weresweethearts.
In high school she took piano lessons from a parttime teacher in a cloak room off the principal’s oft ce.
She practiced at home on her grandmother’s upright moved over from New Orleans. Having skipped a grade in elementary school, she fi nished top in her class at 16 years old and was awarded a coveted T.H. Harris Scholarship to Louisiana State University.
But my father, three years older and already graduated, had other ideas, and sold himself with the proposal, “Well, then, are you going to LSU or will you marry me ?”Mother saw the diamond in his rough. In a decision that would cause feminist bristling today, she opted for a pulpwood trucker supplying the Bogalusa paper mill instead of a Baton Rouge college degree.
Later, this woman of the greatest generation kept the home fi res burning, worked in an aircraft plant and bore a child, my older sister, while her husband was across the ocean with Gen. Patton.
Upon my father’s return they moved into the Talley homestead farmhouse with my grandparents and began a farming and fertilizer business. My mother’s grace and character were tested those years, rearing two children, as I came along, in the home of her motherin-law, a wiry woman like Granny Clampett, but twice as cantankerous.
During those years she took organ lessons and was the country church organist.
My father purchased aHammond spinet organ like the one in the church so she could conveniently practice at home. In Daddy’s gestures like this over the years I could see my mother made the right decision about LSU. And because of such interaction between them, I learned how to express love and concern for a woman.
The farm-based fertilizer business became a retail feed store in town and required a move, mercifully in my mother’s eyes, to Covington, La., a bit closer to the positive infl uences and her roots in the big city across the lake. We had a home with a telephone and central air conditioning.
Patience and industry were rewarded.
Genteel living in a big city exurb suited Mother well.
She flourished as the family business matron, as church organist at the town’s large Baptist church and as a nationally accredited fl ower show judge. She encouraged her children in academicsand music. For me, that was playing the very same trumpet in the high school band she had played. And I acted in school and local little theater plays and musicals.
Though she worried the Theosophists in little theater might lead me astray from my Broadman Hymnal roots, Mother was always there in the audience with Daddy. Exactly 50 years ago this month, she appeared backstage with my 13-year birthday cake. It was a surprise party for me among fellow adult cast members.
Little scenes in life translate to lasting endearment. I will always love my mother, the Baptist church organist, for graciously serving my birthday cake as the troupe celebrated a Eugene O’Neill opening night with bourbon, Dixie Beer, a lusty chorus of “Happy Birthday” and her homemade cake. Evelyn Talley never, ever used a box mix.
My two sisters becameaccomplished pianists along with their successful teaching and legal careers.
I took performing arts to college in readers’ theater and broadcasting, talents that morphed into a sales and marketing career. My father’s business success provided the stage for all this, but Mother was the director: There was always music and performing arts appreciation in our home.
So this Mother’s Day as I gather with my children I will see my mother in them: Three cellists, a violinist, a junior high trombonist, an award-winning orator and accomplished musical theater actors and singers.
And I will be very thankful for the woman who practiced piano by the flickering light of a kerosene lamp and played her trumpet for Granddaddy’s cows.
TED TALLEY IS A RESIDENT OF BENTONVILLE WHO HAS LIVED IN THE OZARKS FOR 18 YEARS.
Opinion, Pages 13 on 05/12/2013