While I’ve been here in California, Steve has been busy working on his new landscaping website, building raised beds in the greenhouse, visiting his elderly aunt and his parents in the nursing home, and cleaning out the family house in Sleepy Eye, two hours from our house.
He went right to work tackling “the work room,” an unfinished part of the basement that was crammed with “stuff” and files. It was the usual jumble of photos and old papers and unanswered Christmas cards, as well as old small appliances and a set of Encyclopedia Britannica it is impossible to get rid of. He has filled four dumpsters and is now down to the nitty gritty, sorting papers and photos into three piles: trash, recycle, save.
In this process, he has developed a deeper appreciation for his mother’s creativity. We all knew Betty was creative. A story from her childhood was of painting the family piano pink. She had a flair for home decorating, choosing modern, bold fabrics. She made wonderful hand-drawn Christmas cards and felt-on-burlap wall decorations. Much is made of Steve’s paternal grandfather Martin Heymans and the plays he wrote and published with the Catholic Dramatic Movement in the 1920s. But Betty has always talked about her own writing. Usually she spoke of it dismissively saying she published some things but mostly wrote and edited Catholic education newsletters. She often talks about a story she wrote in college, “Mother Married the Milkman,” which drew great praise from her teacher, Sister Mariella Gable, OSB. She tells this story because, she says, she was in a class with a lot of “great and serious writers,” and she was a milkman’s daughter from Faribault. Like so many, that encouragement by her teacher kept her writing.
No one knew how much writing she did, however. Steve found a fat file of rejection letters for work that Betty submitted to magazines like American Baby and Catholic publications. Also, this one from Hallmark Cards. The language in those 1960s and ’70s rejections is quite familiar: “Thank you for sending these materials to Xxx Magazine. Unfortunately, they do not meet our editorial needs at this time.”
Some pieces did get published, but her children don’t remember seeing them. She continued to submit stories to the literary journal published by the College of Saint Benedict into the 1970s. In addition to “Mother Married the Milkman,” Betty often talks about the alliterative slogans she wrote for her father’s dairy: “Mandel Milk Makes Many Mighty Men,” for example.
Not only did she write, she took hundreds of photographs. Among the best are those that chronicle two trips she made before she got married. One was with a fellow teacher to New York City and the East Coast. The other was west to California with her parents. Three photos, particularly, show me who Betty was and where she came from.
The first is of Betty descending the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. She looks ready to take on the world, sophisticated even. I would bet she made that bold polkadot dress herself for the trip.
The second is of her parents, Harry and Julia Mandel, taking a break on the trip west to see the scenery. Another shows Harry viewing a dam in Nebraska.
Betty Mandel Heymans married in 1956 and had her first child, Steven, in 1957. She is the mother of eight and a delight to this day. Even with dementia, she is kind and happy and helpful. Her daughter Amy often takes her to the school next door to the nursing home where they help stuff envelopes and do other tasks. Here she is cutting out hearts for a teacher to use in a Valentine’s Day project.
Everyone I’ve visited in California– and my sister in Seattle– is dealing in one way or another with aging parents. Broken hips, dementia, the pain of downsizing, grief and letting go.
It feels like we’ve moved fully into the 21st century these days. Three people here have talked to me about the advent of driverless cars. The current political situation is, I believe, the beginning (or middle) of the fall of the American Empire. The next generation, and even my generation, live differently– mobile and entrepreneurial with communities that are increasingly virtual. The loss of parents– and the discovery of parents’ pasts– gives many of us a last look back at “the American century,” and a deeper look, possibly, into ourselves.