My mother-in-law, Ruth Howard, has suffered years of abuse at the hands of her children.
Those seven Howard kids are smart-alecky mockers, every one of them, and they've never let their poor mother forget a single mistake she's ever made.
I know all about it. I married one of them. John, like his siblings, has a memory like a steel trap.
"Do you have to remember every ridiculous thing I've ever said?" I hissed, when he once reminded me of the time I'd vowed never to be the mother who screamed at her kids in the grocery store.
Multiply that misery by seven, and you begin to understand what life has been for my mother-in-law.
There's the story, for instance, of her disdain for the women in her town succumbing to the charm of radio personality Cactus Jack Reedus who, with his traveling microphone, would accost women in Gordon's Supermarket.
"LUCILLE PLUNKETT!" he'd leap out from behind the produce aisle to startle an unsuspecting housewife. "Why do YOU shop at Gordon's?"
And over the radio air waves of Greeley, Colorado, every one of those women responded in like.
"I LOVE THE WIDE VARIETY AND LOW, LOW PRICES!"
Every time she heard it, Ruth would roll her eyes hugely. "Those stupid, stupid women!" she'd groan. "They're like sheep!"
One day, John and his brother were driving home from school listening to the radio when Jack Reedus attacked his next innocent victim.
"RUTH HOWARD! Why do YOU shop at Gordon's?"
John and Tom nearly swerved off the road. Recovering, they listened intently to their own mother's nervous voice clearly enunciating, "I LOVE THE WIDE VARIETY AND LOW, LOW PRICES!"
At Gordon's, with the damning microphone pressed close to her face, Ruth clapped her hand over her mouth. But it was too late. In that moment, she understood with stunning clarity that life was forever over as she knew it.
Then there was the broken clock that Ruth took to the repair shop but somehow never got around to picking up. "I've got to get that clock!" she muttered to herself again and again as the days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months.
When I met my mother-in-law three years later, she was still talking about that broken clock. So was her smart-mouthed youngest daughter who perfected an uncanny imitation of her mother. "And tomorrow, by God," Mary would wag her finger exactly in the manner of her mother, "I'm picking up my clock!"
As the youngest, Mary was a little hurt that the newspaper announcement of her birth was the only one of her siblings' not to be carefully pasted into the family photo album. But she was, after all, the seventh child. Ruth, quite frankly, was just a little tired of clipping birth announcements.
Mary, growing up, often assumed her martyred expression. "I guess I'm just not important enough for a birth announcement," she complained one time too many when she was 12 or 13.
"Oh, all right!" her mother snapped. Grabbing the photo album from the lap of her astonished daughter, Ruth furiously scribbled with a number 2 pencil, "To Mr. and Mrs. William Howard, a daughter, Dec. 14th, 1961."
It remains in the photo album to this day.
To Ruth's credit, she laughs at the way her children mock her. In fact, when the Cactus Jack Reedus in Gordon's Supermarket story or the penciled-in birth announcement comes up at family gatherings, she laughs 'til she cries. When you're 90-years-old, you learn to look at your failings with a certain tolerance - even amusement. They don't amount to much, really. Not when you're Ruth Howard, anyway.
Her memories sustain her. A young school teacher from the San Luis Valley in Colorado, she remembers meeting her husband Bill Howard, a Greeley farmer, for the first time.
"He was so good with little kids," she remembers. "I loved that about him."
They married and raised seven of their own on their Eastern Colorado farm. Ruth survived the agony of watching her oldest son drafted into the Viet Nam war and the numerous hail storms that wiped out their crops. She introduced her children to fine music and books and made sure every one of them understood the importance of a college education. After 50 years of marriage, she lost her beloved Bill to cancer and sold the family farm. She's suffered a stroke, diabetes, a broken hip, battled her way back from pneumonia this last winter, and now resides in an assisted living facility in Loveland, Colorado. With the recent death of her sister-in-law Lucille, she's now lost every sibling and friend she ever grew up with. Life didn't quite follow the smooth path she'd planned. It doesn't for any of us.
But my mother-in-law is determined to make the best of it. "I refuse to be unhappy!" she says with firm resolve. To that end, she reads good books, is extremely lucky at Black Jack, and loves the Denver Broncos.
"Sometimes," she confides to my husband John, another of the Denver Bronco faithful, "I have to turn the tv off." She shakes her head sorrowfully. "What on earth was Peyton Manning thinking in the third quarter of that game?"
This last June, all Ruth's kids from Colorado, Nebraska and Montana gathered in the small, pleasant courtyard of her nursing home to celebrate her 90th birthday. Her oldest son Jim grilled brats and burgers, and Ruth settled into a glider swing in the shade of the patio with her walker nearby.
Her nieces and nephews came, some of whom I'd never met in my 30 years married into the Howard family. Her grandchildren arrived, too, and one by one, each of those some 50 people in attendance sat next to the guest of honor, a quintessential grandmother with her fluff of white hair and sweet smile, to gently push the glider back and forth and savor their memories of the special atmosphere that Ruth Howard always managed to create around those she loved.
Her nieces and nephews remembered the Sunday baseball games on the farm and the meals Aunt Ruth heaped on the table afterwards that made you feel you'd died and gone to Heaven.
Her grandkids remembered the books she'd read to them, the Easter egg hunts on the old farm, and the Halloween pumpkins they'd carved with Grandma.
Several residents from the home meandered out to the gathering to inspect this big crowd - all there for Ruth Howard. They shook their heads in wonder. How had one small, white haired old woman attracted the attention of this sprawling group of laughing, happy people? And according to house rules, not a drop of alcohol in sight.
A gentle old resident, struggling with the confusion of dementia, nevertheless enjoyed the great throng of people singing "Happy Birthday" to her friend Ruth. But with vague uncertainty, she turned to the tall man beside her and asked, for the fourth time, who he was.
"I'm Ruth's son," he said just as politely as the three times before.
"Oh, Ruth!" she remembered her friend on the glider. "So many people here!" She squinted up in the sun at the man. "She must be a very special person, your mother."
My husband John nodded. He thought of Jack Reedus and failed crops and a broken clock that never came home.
And he remembered a hot day in July nearly 14 years ago when his car broke down in Sterling, Colorado, with his wife and two little boys sweltering in the heat. He followed his very first instinct. He called his mother.
She'd driven like a bat out of hell the 90 miles to Sterling to rescue her family. He'd remembered his 75-year-old mother pulling up in the parking lot of the convenience store where they'd all waited with hot, frayed tempers. She'd pulled herself out of her car, limped through the door, and laughed with the pure pleasure of seeing them.
"Well, there you all are!"
And just like that, everything was all right.
"Yeah," he smiled at the sweet old lady waiting patiently for the reply to a question she'd probably already forgotten.. "As a matter of fact, we couldn't get along without her."
Those seven Howard kids are smart-alecky mockers, every one of them, and they've never let their poor mother forget a single mistake she's ever made.
 |
| Ruth Howard with granddaughter Laura Turner at Ruth's 90th birthday party. |
I know all about it. I married one of them. John, like his siblings, has a memory like a steel trap.
"Do you have to remember every ridiculous thing I've ever said?" I hissed, when he once reminded me of the time I'd vowed never to be the mother who screamed at her kids in the grocery store.
Multiply that misery by seven, and you begin to understand what life has been for my mother-in-law.
There's the story, for instance, of her disdain for the women in her town succumbing to the charm of radio personality Cactus Jack Reedus who, with his traveling microphone, would accost women in Gordon's Supermarket.
"LUCILLE PLUNKETT!" he'd leap out from behind the produce aisle to startle an unsuspecting housewife. "Why do YOU shop at Gordon's?"
And over the radio air waves of Greeley, Colorado, every one of those women responded in like.
"I LOVE THE WIDE VARIETY AND LOW, LOW PRICES!"
Every time she heard it, Ruth would roll her eyes hugely. "Those stupid, stupid women!" she'd groan. "They're like sheep!"
One day, John and his brother were driving home from school listening to the radio when Jack Reedus attacked his next innocent victim.
"RUTH HOWARD! Why do YOU shop at Gordon's?"
John and Tom nearly swerved off the road. Recovering, they listened intently to their own mother's nervous voice clearly enunciating, "I LOVE THE WIDE VARIETY AND LOW, LOW PRICES!"
At Gordon's, with the damning microphone pressed close to her face, Ruth clapped her hand over her mouth. But it was too late. In that moment, she understood with stunning clarity that life was forever over as she knew it.
Then there was the broken clock that Ruth took to the repair shop but somehow never got around to picking up. "I've got to get that clock!" she muttered to herself again and again as the days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months.
When I met my mother-in-law three years later, she was still talking about that broken clock. So was her smart-mouthed youngest daughter who perfected an uncanny imitation of her mother. "And tomorrow, by God," Mary would wag her finger exactly in the manner of her mother, "I'm picking up my clock!"
As the youngest, Mary was a little hurt that the newspaper announcement of her birth was the only one of her siblings' not to be carefully pasted into the family photo album. But she was, after all, the seventh child. Ruth, quite frankly, was just a little tired of clipping birth announcements.
Mary, growing up, often assumed her martyred expression. "I guess I'm just not important enough for a birth announcement," she complained one time too many when she was 12 or 13.
"Oh, all right!" her mother snapped. Grabbing the photo album from the lap of her astonished daughter, Ruth furiously scribbled with a number 2 pencil, "To Mr. and Mrs. William Howard, a daughter, Dec. 14th, 1961."
It remains in the photo album to this day.
To Ruth's credit, she laughs at the way her children mock her. In fact, when the Cactus Jack Reedus in Gordon's Supermarket story or the penciled-in birth announcement comes up at family gatherings, she laughs 'til she cries. When you're 90-years-old, you learn to look at your failings with a certain tolerance - even amusement. They don't amount to much, really. Not when you're Ruth Howard, anyway.
Her memories sustain her. A young school teacher from the San Luis Valley in Colorado, she remembers meeting her husband Bill Howard, a Greeley farmer, for the first time.
"He was so good with little kids," she remembers. "I loved that about him."
They married and raised seven of their own on their Eastern Colorado farm. Ruth survived the agony of watching her oldest son drafted into the Viet Nam war and the numerous hail storms that wiped out their crops. She introduced her children to fine music and books and made sure every one of them understood the importance of a college education. After 50 years of marriage, she lost her beloved Bill to cancer and sold the family farm. She's suffered a stroke, diabetes, a broken hip, battled her way back from pneumonia this last winter, and now resides in an assisted living facility in Loveland, Colorado. With the recent death of her sister-in-law Lucille, she's now lost every sibling and friend she ever grew up with. Life didn't quite follow the smooth path she'd planned. It doesn't for any of us.
But my mother-in-law is determined to make the best of it. "I refuse to be unhappy!" she says with firm resolve. To that end, she reads good books, is extremely lucky at Black Jack, and loves the Denver Broncos.
"Sometimes," she confides to my husband John, another of the Denver Bronco faithful, "I have to turn the tv off." She shakes her head sorrowfully. "What on earth was Peyton Manning thinking in the third quarter of that game?"
This last June, all Ruth's kids from Colorado, Nebraska and Montana gathered in the small, pleasant courtyard of her nursing home to celebrate her 90th birthday. Her oldest son Jim grilled brats and burgers, and Ruth settled into a glider swing in the shade of the patio with her walker nearby.
Her nieces and nephews came, some of whom I'd never met in my 30 years married into the Howard family. Her grandchildren arrived, too, and one by one, each of those some 50 people in attendance sat next to the guest of honor, a quintessential grandmother with her fluff of white hair and sweet smile, to gently push the glider back and forth and savor their memories of the special atmosphere that Ruth Howard always managed to create around those she loved.
Her nieces and nephews remembered the Sunday baseball games on the farm and the meals Aunt Ruth heaped on the table afterwards that made you feel you'd died and gone to Heaven.
Her grandkids remembered the books she'd read to them, the Easter egg hunts on the old farm, and the Halloween pumpkins they'd carved with Grandma.
Several residents from the home meandered out to the gathering to inspect this big crowd - all there for Ruth Howard. They shook their heads in wonder. How had one small, white haired old woman attracted the attention of this sprawling group of laughing, happy people? And according to house rules, not a drop of alcohol in sight.
A gentle old resident, struggling with the confusion of dementia, nevertheless enjoyed the great throng of people singing "Happy Birthday" to her friend Ruth. But with vague uncertainty, she turned to the tall man beside her and asked, for the fourth time, who he was.
"I'm Ruth's son," he said just as politely as the three times before.
"Oh, Ruth!" she remembered her friend on the glider. "So many people here!" She squinted up in the sun at the man. "She must be a very special person, your mother."
My husband John nodded. He thought of Jack Reedus and failed crops and a broken clock that never came home.
And he remembered a hot day in July nearly 14 years ago when his car broke down in Sterling, Colorado, with his wife and two little boys sweltering in the heat. He followed his very first instinct. He called his mother.
She'd driven like a bat out of hell the 90 miles to Sterling to rescue her family. He'd remembered his 75-year-old mother pulling up in the parking lot of the convenience store where they'd all waited with hot, frayed tempers. She'd pulled herself out of her car, limped through the door, and laughed with the pure pleasure of seeing them.
"Well, there you all are!"
And just like that, everything was all right.
"Yeah," he smiled at the sweet old lady waiting patiently for the reply to a question she'd probably already forgotten.. "As a matter of fact, we couldn't get along without her."
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