Barbara Bush – First Lady of Words

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Barbara Bush, First Lady, George H. W. Bush, memoir

Barbara Pierce Bush   White House Portrait by Herbert E. Abrams

I imagine in the coming days stories of the former First Lady Barbara Bush will fill the airwaves and spread across the internet. This week her family informed the public the Bush family matriarch is no longer pursuing medical care for her life-threatening illness. Instead, she is choosing to spend her days in comfort care and to be among her family. More likely, she’ll be the one providing comfort.

So, there’s no better candidate today to profile than everyone’s favorite First Lady, dubbed fondly “First Mom.” For as long as she has been in the public eye, Barbara Bush has been the epitome of the perfect mother and wife. She is blessed with family-oriented values, refined, unquestioning, strict, and loving.

Besides those admirable qualities, during her tenure in the White House she was a champion of literacy, something that evolved from her own love of books and the Pierce family’s obsession with reading. And, she is an author.

Barbara published her memoir in 2015, telling the story of her life. The book covers her early years, growing up in Rye, New York, meeting and falling in love with George Herbert Walker Bush, standing by her husband in good times and bad through political campaigns and the White House years, and starting life again when the two left the Washington.

As a member of the Greatest Generation, the former First Lady was witness to many milestones in our country’s history and folklore. In her book she mentions the Charles Lindbergh baby kidnapping, Amelia Earhart’s flight, the Hindenberg disaster, and World War II. Her focus, however, was her family and her beloved lifelong companion, George.

Barbara credits her mother with advice that sustained her throughout her own, saying “You have two choices in life. You can like what you do or you can dislike it.” Barbara says she chose to like it.

Many would say it wouldn’t be hard to like what you do being brought up in the rarified atmosphere of Rye and in a home with a staff. Then again, as the saying goes, privilege and wealth can’t buy happiness.

“We always lived in happy homes,” Barbara says.

I wish the First Mom much happiness in her remaining days.

Still Life With Quilt

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artist, memoir, mother, quilting, relationship, sister, woman, women

In the months before she died, my mother obsessed over a single event from her early life—a time when she scrawled an image on the kitchen wall, displaying her skill and testing the bounds of parental authority.  Why she returned to that event, telling the story over and over despite the fog of dementia, no one can ever say.  But I speculate her passion for creative expression had a lot to do with how she lived her life, what she chose to remember about it, and what she was proud to pass on.

Over the years, I’ve marveled at how her talent, one microscopic gene on a tiny strand of DNA manifested itself in each of her children.  In my younger sister’s case, it’s at the surface —sometimes in physical appearance, when the light is right and she holds her head at a certain angle.  She paints and sculpts, meeting the technical definition of an artist, but labels her work “completely mixed media.”

Artist.

Not the word my older sister would likely use to describe herself, and yet, she too has a good dollop of my mother’s legacy.  In her case, the inheritance is more a liberal sprinkling of creative dust, like a first winter snow across the landscape.

Recently, she took up the almost forgotten art of quilting.  While our grandmother taught us to knit and crochet so many years ago now, my sister’s quilting is self-taught.  Quilting is a process she describes as creating pattern out of chaos.  Though influenced by available colors and patterns, she says the quilt comes together only after experimenting with myriad arrangements of pieces of fabric.  Her “quilt in progress” is a compilation of hexagons in a dozen ice cream colors, sure to delight a three-year-old granddaughter in her pink phase.  Assembled on a spare wall where she can arrange and rearrange the pieces, the effect is more free-flowing than a series of straight-edged hexagons might suggest.  Still as she contemplates the design, my sister wonders if she’s made chaos out of pattern rather than the other way around.

My mother’s batting three for three, so to speak.

As I consider her endowment, however, I realize how much or little I know about my siblings.  I know, of course, they are wives and mothers and grandmothers and aunts (or in my brother’s case a husband and father and uncle).  But, if asked, I couldn’t say how each would describe their life’s work and their legacy.

From the perspective of a writer (the creativity manifestation I’ll claim), I challenged myself.  I’d explore my sister’s psyche from a distance.  The effort, familiar, like breathing life into a fictional character.

Let’s call her “Liz” and say she is five feet three inches tall with blond hair and blue eyes, though the sterile description offers little insight.  Instead, I could say, she has my mother’s hands, slender fingers with nails in perfect ovals compared with my flat and stunted ones, or she wears her hair in close-cropped curls that conceal gray more effectively than any salon’s dye.  Still, these are barely more than physical attributes.  And I want to give my character more flesh, more color, more life.

As we’re separated by considerable distance, we see each other only once or twice a year.  So what I have to complete the exercise are bits and pieces of a life, images and memories of her logged away in my head.  They’re like little hexagons and squares and rectangles I have to arrange to reveal the woman, or, in quilting terms, make pattern out of chaos.

In her role as mother, and endowed with another family trait, a love of food, my sister cooked countless family dinners.  Occasionally, she shared recipes she’d borrowed, tweaked, worked and reworked, and perfected.  While I experiment in the kitchen, and sometimes relegate an entire meal to the garbage disposal, a few of Liz’s recipes are family lore.  If her thanksgiving specialty, caramelized pecans and sweet potatoes, is absent from the table, everyone is disappointed.

And, while I am on the subject of mothers, let me not overlook the art of motherhood.  Liz is mother to three—all adults, all gainfully employed and all with families of their own.  Not one has robbed a bank, dealt in drugs, or run off to join Ringling Brothers, at least, not that I know.  It’s an achievement deserving of the word “art” in capital letters.

Liz also has a facility with words, this perhaps inherited from my father’s side.  She’s a wordsmith, someone I would not want to tangle with in a game of Scrabble, or “Words with Friends”.  She’s fluent in French, a language we both learned as children.  I long ago forgot all but a token tourist phrase or two, but somehow the language stayed lodged in her brain and on the tip of her tongue.  She’s worked as an editor and copy writer and authored a children’s book.  She’s a voracious reader and devours two or three books a week.  And, as far as the more traditional visual arts go, she’s painted landscapes and still lifes, even sold a few.

As I reflect, I realize how many pieces and shapes I’ve unearthed from memory.  Perhaps, if I tack them to the wall, step back, and squint my eyes, I’ll see my sister as a whole woman.  Sister, daughter, wife, mother, aunt, grandmother, and artist.

One you can expect to see in disguise in a future novel.

Fathers and Daughters

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daughters, fathers, memoir, short stories

Before too much time passes, I wanted to share a short piece I wrote in honor of fathers and daughters or more precisely, my father and a memory I had to share with him on the most recent Father’s Day.

Please share a special memory of your own!

Yum Yum!
Baking did not come naturally to me. I once took a gourmet cooking class and managed to turn out several wonderful three and four course meals, but only by blindly and exactingly following the instructions.
On this year’s Father’s Day, I found myself in the midst of a project to bake and photograph a number of recipes handed down by my grandmother, among them: a white cake with coconut frosting, sugar cookies, Kuchen, a German Chocolate Cake, and date bars, a perennial family favorite. As I was stirring the flour into the whisked eggs for a batch of date bars, a voice in the back of my head whispered, “The dough is awfully thick.” Yes, it’s supposed to be, I thought, swatting at the nagging voice. “It’s not the right color.” I know, it does look a tad too yellow, but maybe that’s because I used fresh farm eggs, I said and then proceeded to the next and last step, which was to fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites. “Fold in,” the voice reminded me. I can’t, I replied, the dough is too stiff. Go away. I’ll use my fingers. Okay, it’s still a little stiff, but I’ve gone too far to start over. Anyway, I did increase the portions for dates and pecans—the best parts—so never mind. Off it goes, into the oven.
Thirty minutes later, I removed the hardened near-brick like square of dough from the oven. I’d have to visit my father on Father’s Day empty-handed. I was crestfallen. I’d used up all the dates and pecans I had on hand so there was no way to bake another batch. What to do. What to do. I decided to try to try to make lemonade from my lemon. I let the batch cool, sliced it into squares, and then dusted the bars with several heaping spoonfuls of powdered sugar. I bit into one. “It’s not very sweet,” the voice said. “It’s a bit hard.” Hard, yes, but not impossible to chew—just shy of a biscotti I thought optimistically.
I looked back over the recipe to see where I’d gone wrong. My grandmother knew what to do when but never thought to include those details. So, I should have blended the vanilla with the milk before adding the milk to the dough. I should have used whole milk rather than the healthier non-fat variety. And, worst of all, I’d omitted one very important ingredient altogether, sugar. The recipe called for a cup and a half.
What a disappointment. The failure reminded me of a day almost fifty years ago. I was maybe ten years old and was attempting to bake a cake “on my own”. I don’t remember what type of cake, but likely another of my grandmother’s recipes. It was also likely that both my grandmother and mother were present to lend a helping hand should I need one. I was determined, however, to prove I could do it without help. After carefully following the instructions, I slipped my two cake pans into the oven and sat back to wait. Thirty or forty minutes later, with an oven mitt on each hand, I reached in the oven and removed the cake pans, carried them gingerly to the counter and then flipped them over. Two brown discs hit fell to the counter with a thud. I’d forgotten the milk.
I could barely look at the cake though I’m certain my siblings had and that they promptly doubled over with laughter. I sobbed.
Shortly, my father came in to the kitchen, immediately saw how devastated I was. He took a slice of one of the circular pieces of firm dough, how he managed to cut it I don’t recall, and gobbled it down. He went for another and exclaimed how good it was. I think I cried even harder. If I remember correctly, he finished the whole “cake”.
Now, I glanced down at my date bars and put another spoonful of powdered sugar on each. I was taking them to my father who I knew would eat them and declare them “the best”.

Memoirs — Drawing on Life

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Anne Lamott, author, Marlayna Glynn Brown, memoir, Overlay

Anne Lamott, in one of my favorite books on writing, suggested that writers who lack something to write turn to their own life for inspiration. A few years ago, I took Ms. Lamott’s advice and found the experience incredibly valuable – not knowing at the time whether I intended to do anything with the documented memories (the process is outlined in her inspirational book Bird by Bird). I unveiled the skeleton of a story that I would use for my first novel (still unpublished, but coming closer). The tale is based on my grandmother’s life, or at least what I imagined her life to have been. As I added flesh to the skeleton, I also garnished the story with several dashes of pepper and slices of onion. It needed a lot of embellishment.
Recently, I read Marlayna Glynn Brown’s memoir Overlay, A Tale of One Girl’s Life in 1970’s Las Vegas. Now here is someone who doesn’t have to spice things up—in fact, I think she may have toned a few things down! The title provides a hint at what’s to come. If you’ve ever been to Las Vegas you may have some sense of how distorted a picture of real life a child might get had they grown up there. And then, if you add in two here now then gone again parents—a father who drives his family across the country drunk, a mother who drags her daughter when she sleeps with an endless series of men—you begin to see a picture of a very different sort.
In this first of a series of three memoirs of her life, we watch, our heart breaking, as young Marlayna suffers one disappointment after another, some over small things, things like you or I might have mourned. But hers is a deeper los. As she says after one more disappointment, “that empty feeling returns and spreads throughout my body, as if someone pulls a plug and all the happiness drains through the soles of my feet.”
According to Anne Lamott, Flannery O’Connor said that “anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if well done.”
In Marlayna Brown’s case, grim and horrible is more than “okay” it is riveting. As I read her story, I kept reminding myself how lucky I was to have a “normal” childhood—though of course Marlayna does have an advantage, she doesn’t have to make so much up!

For more information on Marlayna, visit: http://www.marlaynaglynnbrown.com