Ninety And Nine

My mother used to sing a hymn when she did housework. This was when I was a small boy; when I was older, she never sang, though I don’t know why. The hymn I remember her singing often was “There Were Ninety and Nine,” and I can’t recall the last time I heard anyone sing or play this old chestnut.

It’s a strange sort of dovetailing, me thinking of this hymn this morning, because today would have been my mother’s 99th birthday, and in the dark silence of the predawn, I heard a neighbor’s sheep baaing down in the holler. In the ancient world, such things would likely have been seen as ominous or portentous.

I leave my house daily because I have to work, but my family and friends would readily tell anyone that I’m as close to being a recluse as a man can get without actually being one. Calling me a “homebody” just doesn’t do justice to how much I love to be home, and how much I detest being away from my home, especially out in crowded, noisy places. I could easily be the local crazy old hermit, given the right impetus and circumstances. I prefer eating a piece of bread in my kitchen to eating prime rib in a restaurant, and I think I can trace this reclusive mindset to my mother’s influence.

We had very little when I was a child, and my mother toiled at a menial job for the food and clothing and shelter we did have. Mother never learned to drive, never owned a car, and we had no relatives living near us, so we walked everywhere we went. Mother trudged to work every day, in all weathers. I remember her taking exactly two sick days in my entire childhood, and noting this fact adds a special edge to how I feel about my young coworkers today who call in sick for the thinnest and most transparent of reasons. Many’s the time Mother walked to work, put in a full shift on her feet in a hot kitchen, walked home, waited for my sister and me to arrive home from school, and then set out for the grocery store two miles away with us skipping along with her. And then we got the extra treat of carrying home the groceries along the weedy shoulders of roads while schoolmates stared at us from the windows of passing cars. To this day, the sight of a brown paper grocery sack makes my bones hurt, the memory of canned goods pressing down on my sharp hips while I hugged them to me with trembling pencils of arms and took quick steps to keep up with Mother.

When we were home, there were no stares, no whispers, no sense of being different or inferior or lacking. At home was Mother, forever cooking or cleaning, singing under her breath. At home were quiet, spotless rooms with our shabby discount store furnishings and bare bulbs in the ceiling. At home were books.

Children’s books at first, and then comic books, which Mother never saw as a waste of money. “Any reading is good reading,” she would say. And she would ask me to read to her. Ah, those sessions of her washing dishes while I perched on the red kitchen step-stool and dramatized Classic Comics and Archie & Jughead and the Sad Sack and Richie Rich. And I would read her the ads for Sea Monkeys and Magic Rocks, and she would define words for me when they blocked me — I still remember learning the word “egad,” a word never heard anymore, from the cover of an Archie comic…Mr. Weatherby was exclaiming the word as Archie and Reggie dashed by him in the school hallway.

But the real treasure came later, when Mother walked almost three miles with me a week after I turned twelve and escorted me into the public library, where I applied for and received my library card. It was orange cardboard, about three inches square, it had a metal tab embedded in it, and when the librarian put it in the machine and fed a check-out card into the machine, a loud THUNK would bite off a bit of the check-out card for each book, and the librarian would hand me back my card, and she would usually comment on my selections that week. Because every week, Mother and I made that long trip by foot, in blistering summer when the asphalt stuck to my tennies and burned my soles, and in freezing winter when I would get a sore throat from chattering at Mother on the walk to and from the library. I look back in wonder at the fact that she didn’t push me in front of a bus just so she could have a bit of quiet.

The books were always piled on one end of the kitchen table. We had no dining room. The small living room was crowded with a creaking couch and easy chair and our little black & white television, and we didn’t spend much time there. We were always in the kitchen. In the summertime, the window fan pulled in cool air through the kitchen window and the back screen door, and in the winter, the gas cooking stove warmed us as we sat around the table. I can still see the table — it had aluminum legs, and the top was white with little gold flecks the size of pepper flakes. We had four mismatched Naugahyde chairs, but I would often end up on the linoleum-covered concrete floor, beneath the table with a book on the seat of one of the chairs, thousands of miles or years away, in some foreign country or in some king’s hall or in the craters on some distant planet or in someone else’s mind.

The books were safe and kind, and there was never any negative connotation tied to them. That is, unless my Mother’s people came around; there was always room for a “He’s always got his nose stuck in some old book!” sneer, but this was not frequent. The volumes with their fabric covers and mysterious smells and sometimes yellowing pages…they were books I chose myself, checked out with my own library card, toted home with my own skinny arms, and pored over with my blue eyes, eyes that looked like my mother’s, eyes that saw everything and understood too little. I loved the books, and I loved being home with them. I never wanted to leave the books, never wanted to go to school, never wanted anything in the hateful world outside the walls of the little house on Linden Street.

But of course I had to leave the books, leave the safe, warm kitchen, and go out with my nervous steps into the world that was always watching me, always grinning at me but never smiling. And all the world ever did was drive me back to the little house, back to the kitchen and its red stool, back to the books, back to my mother who alone held it all together. The joy of the coziness of it all never left me, and it is with me now as I write these words and think of my mother.

The books are still my joy and my security, and home is still where I want to be, all of the time, every day. I can no longer get down in the floor and sprawl out with my books, but I can sit in my chair or on a stool in the kitchen or on the front steps, and I can again feel the gift my mother provided for me: a quiet, safe place to read.

I wish just one more time I could hear her opening the oven door and sliding that well-worn baking sheet inside with a batch of her biscuits. I wish just one more time she’d squinch up her eyes as she lit a cigarette and blew a thin stream of smoke out of the corner of her mouth and say, “Why don’t you read to me, doll?” And I would, too. Oh, I would, Mother.

For now, I’m keeping watch here in the place where a safe kitchen is still a central part of my daily life. And I believe you’re watching, too. Watching me read the books.

Happy Birthday, Mother. I love you and I never stop missing you.

~ S.K. Orr