Eulogy for mom

Good morning. I’m Elie, Samia’s son, the middle one.

For forty years my mother talked to me with a mouthful of pins. She ran Khoury Flowers on Hamilton Street for thirty-three years. If you’ve been married, buried or sent to a prom in Allentown since 1990, there’s a good chance she pinned something on you.

Every Easter, before church, I stood on a milk crate in the back of the shop while she pinned a carnation to my jacket. She’d say, “Stand still,” through the pins. I never stood still. She’d sigh, take one pin out of her mouth and poke me, very lightly, in the arm. It worked every time.

Mom came here from a village in the mountains north of Beirut when she was nineteen. She had an uncle in Allentown, a pair of pruning shears and about forty words of English, most of them about flowers. She learned the rest from customers. She learned “carnation” before she learned “please,” and she said both with the same face.

The shop was where she raised us. My sister Rania did her homework at the worktable. I napped under it more afternoons than I can count, on a pile of ribbon, with the cooler humming. To this day, the smell of a florist’s cooler puts me to sleep.

She was a hard woman to fool. She’d tell a bride, kindly, that her colors were fighting each other and the bride should pick a side. She told Father Boutros his altar lilies looked tired, and she replaced them the same afternoon. She told me, the week before my wedding, that my boutonniere was perfect and my haircut was a mistake. She was right about the haircut.

She also gave flowers away all the time. The family upstairs from the shop got flowers for every First Communion and never saw a bill. When my father was in the hospital, she brought a jar of flowers to his room every morning, and one to the nurses’ station too, because she said a hospital room should look like somebody lives there.

What she taught me is that you take care of people with your hands. You notice what’s missing on somebody’s worst day or their best one, and you bring it, and you don’t mention it afterward.

Last week I went to the shop to close it up. On the counter was an order slip for a boutonniere, for a man’s fiftieth wedding anniversary, in her handwriting. I called him. He came in, and he cried in the doorway, and I made the boutonniere myself while he waited, badly, the way she showed me when I was twelve. I pinned it on him. He said it was perfect. It wasn’t.

Mama, I’m standing still now. I’m going to keep a pin in my pocket, in case anybody needs a flower on. Allah yerhamik, Mama. God rest you.

Hi, everybody. I’m Celeste, and Bunny Thibodeaux was my mama. Her real name was Bernice, but nobody has called her that since about 1971, including the IRS, as far as she was concerned.

If you grew up in Houma in the last thirty years, Mama probably drove you to school. Bus 14, Route 9. She drove it for thirty-one years, and she honked twice at every house.

I didn’t know until I was grown that the two honks meant something. The first one meant “I see you.” The second one meant “I’ll wait.” She told me that like it was obvious.

She waited a lot. She waited for the boy who couldn’t find his other shoe. She waited for the girl whose mama worked nights and needed a minute to finish her braids. The district told her more than once to stop waiting, and she said, “Yes, sir,” and kept right on waiting.

Under the driver’s seat she kept a coffee can full of hard candy, Band-Aids, safety pins and a five-dollar bill folded very small. Nobody ever asked what the five dollars was for. Everybody knew.

Being Bunny’s daughter meant I couldn’t get away with anything in this parish. Junior year, I skipped school and made it as far as the Piggly Wiggly before a lady I’d never seen in my life said, “Aren’t you Bunny’s girl?” Mama knew before I got home. She didn’t yell. She said, “Bus leaves at 6:40, baby.” For the rest of that year I rode Bus 14 to school in the front seat, right behind her. It was the most embarrassing year of my life, and I’d give a lot to ride in that seat one more morning.

Mama sang. She sang in the choir at First Assembly on Sundays, and she sang on the bus the other six days. Hymns, mostly, and the old French songs her mother taught her. There are grown men in this room who can sing every verse of “Blessed Assurance” and have no idea where they learned it.

When the hurricanes came, she drove evacuation buses for the parish, and she never once talked about it like she’d done anything special.

What I learned from her is that showing up at the same time every day is a way of loving people. For a lot of kids in this room, a bus at the corner at 6:40, rain or shine, was the one thing at home that didn’t change.

Mama, I’m going to honk twice every time I drive past your house. I see you. I’ll wait.

Thank you all for coming. I’m Audra, Molly’s daughter. Her name was Hsiu-Mei, and she let the whole world call her Molly because, she said, it saved everybody time.

I’m her only child, and today I’m noticing what that means. There’s no brother next to me who remembers the same Christmas differently. There’s nobody to elbow when someone tells a story wrong. For most of my life it was just the two of us.

Mom called us “the committee.” Every decision, from what to have for dinner to which college I went to, went to the committee. The committee voted two to nothing, or it didn’t happen.

My dad died when I was six. Mom had been in this country for nine years. She had a business degree from Taiwan that didn’t count here, a mortgage and a first grader. As far as I know, she cried once where I could see it, in the car, in the parking lot of my school. Then she wiped her face and walked me in.

She ran a tax office in a strip mall on Montgomery for twenty-eight years, and half of Albuquerque had her do their taxes. She knew what everybody earned, and she never repeated a word of it. If you ran into her in the cereal aisle, she’d ask about your grandkids. She would not ask about your receipts, even though she was thinking about it.

Every August the committee drove to Hatch for green chile. We left at five in the morning with a cooler and a thermos of jasmine tea, and we came home with forty pounds of chile roasted at a stand by the highway. Mom peeled every one of them at the kitchen table, in yellow rubber gloves, and talked about whatever was on her mind that year. That’s where I heard about her childhood in Taichung. That’s where she told me she was proud of me. She didn’t say it often, and when she did, she said it to the chile.

For the last two years, I took care of her at home. People told me how hard that must be, and some days it was. The committee still met. She still had opinions about my boyfriend, my car and how I folded towels.

Three weeks ago, when she couldn’t get out of bed anymore, she asked me if I’d bought the chile yet. I hadn’t. I drove to Hatch the next morning by myself, and I peeled them at the foot of her bed while she watched. She told me I was leaving too much skin on. I was.

Mom, the committee is down to one. I’m going to keep meeting. I’ll go to Hatch in August, and I’ll leave less skin on, and I’ll tell the chile I’m proud of you. Thank you for every vote.

Good afternoon. I’m Shawna, Vonda’s oldest.

I want to be honest up here, because Mom couldn’t stand anything else. She and I did not get along for most of my life. We said hard things to each other, and some years we didn’t say anything at all. A lot of you know that, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise today.

Here’s some of what I know about her.

After our father left in 1979, she raised five kids in a two-bedroom house on the West Side of Charleston on a nurse’s aide’s pay. She worked doubles at the nursing home. She came home with her feet swollen and her patience used up, and I was the oldest, so I got what was left of it. She was tired for twenty years. She was hard on us, and I was a kid who wanted somebody soft.

She also taught me to grow anything. Every spring she turned that little backyard into tomatoes, pole beans and peppers. She’d put me on my knees in the dirt next to her and not say a word for an hour. Those were our best hours. When we didn’t have to talk, we got along fine.

When I left for Cincinnati at nineteen, she didn’t come to the bus station. For a long time I took that to mean she didn’t care. Last month my brother Royce told me she drove down there anyway. She parked across the street, watched the bus pull out and then went to work. She never told me. I don’t know what to do with that yet.

We got a little easier with each other in the last few years. She’d call in July to tell me her tomatoes were ahead of mine, and she was always right. I’d call back in August to tell her mine were bigger, and I was usually lying. That was about as much as we could manage, and I’ve decided it counts.

I don’t have a lesson from my mother that fits on a card. I’m tough because she was. I’m working on being gentle, because she never got the chance. I think she’d understand both of those.

Mom, this spring I planted tomatoes from the seeds you saved in the envelope on your fridge. They came up. I’ll save the seeds this fall, the way you did. I loved you, and it wasn’t simple, and I think you knew that.

Good morning. My name is Tobias. Paulette married my dad when I was thirteen, and I made it very clear to her that she was not my mother.

She agreed with me. That was the first thing that threw me off. She said, “You have a mother, and she’s a good one. I’m Paulette. You can call me that.” So I did, for twenty-six years.

My mother is here today. She asked me to say something for her, and I’m going to, because it tells you a lot about both of them. She asked me to say that Paulette was good to me, and that she was grateful.

Thirteen was a rough year for me. I stayed out late on purpose, mostly to see what Paulette would do about it. What she did was leave a plate in the oven. Every single night. Rice and peas, curry chicken if I was lucky, foil on top, oven on warm. She never waited up, and she never said a word about the time. In the morning the plate would be washed and back in the cabinet, and somehow that ended the argument before I could start it.

Paulette came to Hartford from Montego Bay when she was twenty-two. She was a dental hygienist for thirty years, which meant she knew exactly how much candy I was eating, and she told me.

She was a Seventh-day Adventist. From sundown Friday to sundown Saturday she kept the Sabbath, which meant no work, no shopping and, to my great teenage suffering, no television. Friday night dinner was the one thing she asked of me. I complained about it for two years. Then, without anybody deciding it, I was the one setting the table. I brought my wife, Inés, to Friday dinner on our third date. Paulette told her about the plate in the oven, and Inés married me anyway.

When my dad had his stroke six years ago, Paulette took care of him at home until the end. She never once complained to me. She’d call and say, “Your father had a good day. He asked about you.” After he died, I started calling her every Friday before sundown. We talked for ten minutes. She told me what she was cooking, and I lied about what I was cooking.

What Paulette taught me is that you can love a kid who isn’t yours and doesn’t want you to. You leave the plate, and you keep leaving it, and one night he comes home and eats it.

Paulette, I never called you Mom, and you never asked me to. That was one of the kindest things anybody has done for me. I’ll keep the Friday dinners going. When my own kids turn thirteen, I’ll keep a plate in the oven. Rest now, until the morning.