REMEMBERING HELEN ON HER BIRTHDAY - A REPRISE

REMEMBERING HELEN ON HER BIRTHDAY – A REPRISE

She set the bar incredibly high.

I often wondered where her mothering skills came from. Her own mother was so busy raising seven children she had little time to mentor her own daughters. She was a skinny teenager when I met her, wearing a long Pendleton skirt, rolled up bobby sox and penny loafers. Her cooking skills fell somewhere between making PB&J sandwiches and unwrapping packages of Twinkies. She thought a check book was about life in a Slavic country. To her, a thimble and a flat iron were game pieces on a Monopoly Board.

She dropped out of college after a couple of semesters in order to go to work. She went to her interview at General Motors wearing a beige suit with matching hat and gloves. A savvy employment manager recognized something special in her, and put her to work on a computer that was big enough to fill the infield at Brigg's Stadium. She learned programming, and soon became an instructor teaching others how to program, while she wrote script in a language called COBAL, as foreign to me as Urdu.

She was Ginger Rogers on the dance floor, but I was Fred Despair, who could trip over the painted white lines on a parking lot surface. One day she dragged me onto the dance floor. She was as light and feathery as an apparition; she knew where I was going before I knew where I was going. We glided through life with her making me believe I was leading. She thought I was the funniest person she had ever met, so when we married in 1958 I set out to make her laugh as often as I could.

We hadn't heard of feng shui, but without the aid of an accurate Chinese compass she turned our upper flat into heaven on earth. Then I proceeded to drag her all over the country for the next four decades. No matter where we ended up, in a matter or weeks she had the place looking like we were the original owners. Twice I bought homes she had never seen until we met the moving van there. She swept the front walk, talking to passers-by until she befriended the entire neighborhood. She made curtains and drapes and made clothes for the kids and for herself. If she put her mind to it, I swear she could weave straw into gold.

Once I plunked her down on 10 rural acres in the middle of nowhere, with a house half the size of the one we left. She bought a huge freezer, planned meals for a month, and then shopped so efficiently that I only had to bring home milk and bread once in a while — and then just milk because she began baking bread.

On Mother's Day in 1975 I bought her a 10 horsepower gas-operated rototiller. You would have thought I had emptied out Tiffany's for her. She tilled the land into a garden overflowing with enough healthful food to make a heart specialist smile.

And she learned to cook, too. She became so good that she created a cookbook she gave to close friends as Christmas gifts. It remains the one book that keeps me from slipping into fast-food purgatory.

She never gave up on her education, and during the same week our youngest daughter graduated from high school, and our son graduated from college, she earned her AA degree from a community college — with honors.

At her memorial service, a cousin confided in me that my wife told him I made her laugh every day. I doubt that's true. The philosopher Plato said: "In everyone's life no matter how good their intent there are people they made suffer." But if I unintentionally made her suffer she suffered silently — remaining at my side, but like the dancing, always a step ahead of me.

She set the bar incredibly high for our two daughters, giving them her best so that they could be their best. It is no surprise they are loving mothers. And I never have to wonder where their mothering skills come from. Ironically we celebrate her birthday on a day when a furry rodent is supposed to see its shadow. In life Helen cast a long shadow of her own. In death, the light that spread that shadow to such great length still shines.

Happy Birthday!