by John Ringo
In 1936 (the height of the Depression, mind you) in New York, sixteen year-old young ladies were not considered appropriate candidates for Columbia working on a physics degree. (Which was her top choice, she once told me.)
Her biggest story about school was getting into an argument with a nun as to whether the sun and the moon could be up at the same time. "All you have to do is go outside and look!" She had never heard the story about Galileo's "It still moves." When I told it to her, she laughed until she choked.
So she went to work for a small advertising agency on Madison Avenue as a secretary. One can only guess she was a VERY good one. It is notable that on an Underwood manual she could type 120 words a minute.
During the War she tried to join both the WACs and the WAVEs and was turned down because, respectively, she had not had her tonsils and appendix removed. (The latter she had removed in Iran in 1974. But I get ahead of myself.)
She was finally accepted as a Red Cross hostess in 1945 and went to France. There she served coffee and donuts to the enlisted men at Camp Wings (named after the cigarettes, by the way) and, as the stories came out over the years, partied hard with the officers.
("There was this one full bird colonel that was convinced he could get me drunk enough to sleep with him. He didn't know I had a hollow leg so every Saturday night I'd match him drink for drink until they had to carry him back to his quarters. Then the party could really get started." She told me this story when I was... ten I guess. I think it was in Iran. But, again, I get ahead of myself.)
In 1946 she met and married my father, William Pryor Ringo. On the subject of Dad, as one of my brothers pointed out, "There were two girls in the entire camp of 4000 soldiers and Dad married the prettier one." When it was time for her to get a wedding dress she was taken to a warehouse in Paris where some thousands of Parisian-designed wedding dresses were stored, having been seized from the Germans who considered them loot. She was told to pick one out and it would be fitted for her.
The picture of my father and mother, she in her top-tier Paris design dress and he in his pinks-and-greens uniform, is still a family treasure. With the advent of computers it was scanned and rendered and blown up and there was a faint mark on my father's forehead that appeared to be genuine. Years afterwards, in their declining years, my father admitted it was a mark from where his French mistress had hit him with a wine bottle, the morning of the wedding, when he announced he was getting married and they would have to break things off.
One begins to understand my personal oddities.
They had their honeymoon at a castle in Scotland that was a rest and refit post for officers.
They returned on their fiftieth wedding anniversary.
She did a small favor for someone, the memory of the story is blurred by time, and in response they gifted her with a puppy. A blooded Pyrennes Mountain Dog. She smuggled it back on the troopship but quickly realized she couldn't keep it and be a young mother at the same time. She, in turn, gifted him to a wealthy friend from her New York days.
The dog became one of the basis lines of all Pyrennes in the United States today.
Upon returning to the United States the brilliant, cosmopolitan, New York party gal found herself the wife of a student at the University of Kentucky, her husband the scion of a deeply Old South family and her mother-in-law a dyed in the wool Daughter of the Confederacy and Old South high-society matron. My grandmother was, of course, dealing with the fact that her baby had brought back a Brooklyn accented Yankee party-girl war-bride who was (GASP!) Catholic! Ringo family legend has it that the family, then Huguenot, had to leave France due to a death sentence for desecration of Catholic altars and stealing the offertory vessels. Ringos had been staunch Protestant ever since. (We also used to own part of Wall Street and lost it to political shenanigans. True tale. It now belongs to Trinity Church.)
On the Morris side my maternal grandmother's reaction was alleged to have been "Oh my God! Janey's marrying an Italian!"
She adjusted. She learned to cook fried chicken. She told me later that living in the South had deepened her faith because as often the lone Catholic she had to show the heathen Protestants that Catholicism was not, in fact, devil worship.
Over the course of seven years she had five children (two miscarriages) and nearly as many moves. ("Every move is like a fire.") Back to New York for a few years when my father had his engineering degree. Chattanooga (Hi, there!) to work on the new Interstate Project. Miami, where due to some bad timing they had a little (but much loved) oopsy! they named John. (And, yes, it was after the gunfighter.)
One of my brothers says that I'm the proof that the rhythm method is almost perfect. "One mistake in fifty years is pretty good odds."
Wherever they went she adjusted. She coined, I believe, the term "domestic management specialist." She raised six children if not calmly (HAH! My mother had the temper of the Irish.) then well. One Ph.D., one civil engineer, one entrepreneur, one homemaker, one small business owner and, ahem, one best-selling author. Not too shabby.
She was a "professional volunteer" for pretty much everything but notably continued with the Red Cross for decades. (Eventually rising to Director of Volunteers for the Southeastern United States.) She had the all-time highest level of recruitment of "Negroes" (the way it was listed at the time) for the Red Cross.
She was a volunteer for the funeral of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King while we lived (the first time) in Atlanta. (My sister Mary Jane, thereafter, was shunned at her high school because she'd gone to the funeral of "that nigger.") Notably, she got Julian Bond and his wife out early (they had to catch a train to DC) through the security cordons by slipping into her best Southron accent and sweet talking her way past the Georgia State Patrolmen.
She was raised a Republican and died a Republican. She was a strong Right-to-Life supporter and marched in Civil Rights parades in the 1950s and '60s. She supported the Vietnam War and considered Jimmy Carter a traitor for giving up the Panama Canal. She stated in 1956 that "The United States and Russia are never going to have a nuclear war because we're too similar." (For those who aren't old enough, this was heresy especially for a Republican.) She volunteered for the Goldwater and Reagan campaign. She voted for Nixon but was, at best, unsurprised by the revelations of Watergate.
She gave up cigarettes when they went to fifty cents a pack (cold turkey) and donated the money to Christian Children's Fund. She continued to donate (at higher levels) over the subsequent decades. If you'd like to make a contribution in her name, I would be honored. She broke with the Red Cross when, in her words, "They started caring more about the money they made from blood than military families or disasters." She also supported the Audubon Society and The Nature Conservancy.
She considered environmental groups like Sierra Club and Greenpeace to be "run by communists and idiots."
In the 1970s, the older kids having mostly left the nest, she finally got to travel. And travel we did. Each summer she would pack me into the car and off we'd roar across the eastern United States. (Did I mention she had a lead foot?) Visiting friends, visiting relatives. (Even, believe it or not, visiting Graceland because "You might as well see it while we're in Memphis.") As we'd pass through towns she'd point to the interstate signs. "That's us. 'Through Traffic.'"
I learned to navigate using a highway map at the age of eight. When I was nine she finally accepted I could in fact use it better than she. (In Des Moines. "I told you it was the second exit! We're headed to Sioux Falls, now! There's no place to turn around for twenty miles!") She was, and remains ever in my heart, the Queen of the Open Road. There's a touch of Viking in the Morris genes, I swear. ("Aviking" from which we get "Viking" means simply "To Travel." However, see above the thing about temper.)
We rarely lived anywhere that didn't have either a pool or a swimmable lake. Mother had grown up as much as anything on Long Island and continued to visit beaches and swim well into her sixties. Which is why I learned to swim before
I could walk.
In 1974 my father was transferred to Iran to work on a petrochemical plant between Abadan and Bandar Shapur. He was in Abadan for three weeks, "home" in Tehran for one. I was left very much alone with mother.
For the first time since WWII, mother got to really travel. I, perforce, was sucked along in her whirlwind. Over the course of the next two years she (and often I) traveled. My God did she travel. Twice to the USSR, then in the depths of the Cold War, and where she was "detained" by the KGB not once but both times. The first a matter of having some rubles in her purse on the way out, which was whatever is Russian for "verboten," the second because she publicly went off on an officious KGB major in the Moscow Airport. After her second visit she was awarded what she often considered her highest honor: She was PNGed. (Declared Personna Non Grata. "Do not EVER return to the USSR. Ever ever.")
Jordan, Egypt, Israel (on the same trip, by the way, which was tough to do, you had to have the Israelis stamp a piece of paper instead of your passport), Greece, most of Western Europe. Afghanistan. She was stuck on the Kandahar Airport tarmac for eight hours "waiting for the temperature to drop enough the plane could take off." She met bandits in the Khyber Pass and nearly was trampled at a bushkazi game. She was offered ten thousand dollars (a lot of money in 1975) to divorce Dad and marry a Kuwaiti sheik. A trip from Pakistan to Turkey by rail where she shared her compartment with a deserter from the U.S. Army during Vietnam who made his way by gem smuggling. She also met the Queen of England (tea) and the Empress of Iran (private audience).
We walked every station of the cross and just about every spot that Jesus walked in the Gospels. The Garden of Gethsemane, Bethlehem (back when you could go there without bodyguards), Nazareth, all three of the alleged tombs. Remote Greek Orthodox monasteries with artifacts old enough they might have some originality. (One which had been established by Helen of Constantine of whom Mom, honestly, might have been the reincarnation.) I once had a pair of loafers I referred to as (you have to say it) "The holiest shoes in the world."
At her funeral one of my brothers was to deliver the eulogy and he was asking for "special stories" about Mom.
Few of her children really had them. They had mostly grown up in a very normal suburban lifestyle. Classic 1950s "Ozzie and Harriett" with the fillip that "Harriett" was brilliant, beautiful and short-tempered. Most of their stories were about Moms tirades when she'd come home from the grocery store. (Did I mention the really short temper?)
I could barely choose. Finally, I settled on this one.
It was 1976, the year of the Bicentennial. Mother had decided they had been in Iran long enough. Dad would cling to a project, absent another immediately available, until forcibly removed. She was tired of Iran. So, as was her wont, she left. She went to Greece. I'd already been sent to the States in '75 due to "deteriorating conditions" in Iran. She told my brother to get me over to Greece. (Another story. Birmingham, AL, to Athens, Greece, unaccompanied. Unusual to say the least for a thirteen-year-old in 1976.) Eventually, Dad still not willing to leave, we decamped from Athens to the island of Skiathos.
She also had a habit of picking up strays. Not pets. Kids. It was nearly the height of the hippie movement and she had raised six children. When she saw hitchhiking kids or kids making their way through Greece in this case, she tended to bring them home for a home-cooked meal. (One of whom has become a major "New Age" guru. She picked him up on an Easter Sunday in Florida because "We had a spare seat at the table and he looked like Jesus.")
In this case it was a set of four, two girls, two guys. For those who have seen the movie Bottle Shock (and if you haven't, you might be surprised how much you like it) the prettier of the two was the spitting image, including attitude and dress, of the blonde.
The girls supported their bum boyfriends by working in a restaurant down on the waterfront in Skiathos. It was only accessible by a narrow alleyway down the steep hills of the town or by sea. It fronted on a narrow strip of sand and the Aegean.
The family that ran it were also the suppliers. Each day they'd bring in whatever they'd caught to the narrow strip of beach and that was what you ate.
(For those who have read March to the Sea, you may recognize the description... "Good writers create. Great writers steal." ;) )
The eldest son was having a birthday party and since Mom had been so nice to the two Americana girls we were invited.
Have you ever seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding? It's understated. The booze flowed... Freely doesn't describe it. Of course you had to have a stomach for retsina, ouzo and chiparo (sort of the white lighting version of ouzo). But I did. Yes, I was thirteen. See the thing above about "oddities." There is, however, a special hell for whichever ancient Greek decided that anise and turpentine should be drunk together.
The hour being late and we needing to meet our usual taxi driver, Mother, the blonde young lady and I began to navigate our way back to the other side of town up the (very) steep hill.
Which, as it turned out, was where all the fishermen of the town gathered to be away from the tourists. Every second building, it seemed, sported a taberna on its ground floor. Most of them had room for no more than five or six tables but they were all packed.
And the fishermen of the town had taken much the same attitude towards the pretty blond Americana girl as the colonel in France had towards my mother. If they could just get her drunk enough to overlook the goiters and baldness and lack of teeth, surely she'd sleep with one of them!
So as we passed each of the tabernas there would be a glad cry and at the outmost table (which I've come to think they deliberately kept open) would appear a bottle of retsina and, we being with her, three glasses.
I really must try to describe retsina for the fortunate many who have never experienced it.
Take a very bad sauvignon blanc or Graves. The sort of thing you only bring out at the very end of the party and go "well, we're out of all the good, medium and pretty bad stuff..."
Mix it one part to four with Pine Sol.
You have retsina.
I'm serious. Pine. Sol.
The trick to retsina is to drink a lot of it very fast right from the beginning. After that you really have no clue what you are drinking. Aqua Velva starts to taste like Domaine.
Fortunately, we'd already had a lot of retsina. (And ouzo and chiparo and, Christ, maybe there was some Aqua Velva in there. I wouldn't know. You really don't care after you've been drinking retsina long enough.) So this was, as it were, a shower bath in a hurricane.
However, the custom was that you could not leave the table as long as there was wine (for values of wine) left. And as soon as we got down to the bottom of the carafe of ("OH, HOLY GODS NOT MORE! (Wide happy grin, wave!) Kalispera! Kalispera!") retsina, someone would order up another carafe.
The trick was to drink down to near bottom on the three glasses (which meant slamming two thirds as fast as possible) then pour the rest of the carafe, slam that then wave and RUN.
To the next taberna where a glad cry would be raised.
Thirteen.
I don't remember making it to the top of the hill.
The thing is, I'm not even sure that's the best story of traveling with my mother. Then there's the "traditional Danish smorgasbord," the old Greek captain, the "incident" at the Jordanian border, the party in Bangkok, Cameron Highlands, the Swiss franc thing in Bavaria, Gletsch!, the bus tour in Italy, "All-Of-Paris-in-Twenty-Four-Hours"...
People wonder where I get my female characters.
My mother died in her home in the Georgia hills with her son Bob and daughters Mary Jane and Sally at her side of "complications of pneumonia." She had been ready to go since the death of my father (see Gust Front). She had lost all ability to read (her passion). Sans ears, sans eyes, sans teeth. It was time and a grace and mercy. The mother I traveled with had been dead for many years. I did not, do not, grieve for the final crust that left this mortal coil. I do rather miss the bon vivant with whom I once toured t
he world.
If there is a heaven my mother died in the state of perfect Grace her Catholic calling required. They say that rain is the sign of the death of a saintly woman and mother died on a rainy day. She left on this coil six children, nine grandchildren, five great grandchildren and a trail of acquaintances who will remember her until their own passing. Through a thousand gentle mercies I cannot begin to recount, she touched the lives of tens of thousands. Even had she gotten that physics degree, I doubt she could have done more for the world had she perfected Unified Field Theory.
If there is a heaven may it have an open road, a red roadster, her love by her side. May the roads be swift and clear. May there be fine restaurants and taverns at every crossroads and may she ride upon the wind with all the saints by her side.
For my mother, that would truly be heaven.
Gletsch!
—John Ringo
Chattanooga, TN
February 2010
Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
