Today would be my mother’s one hundredth birthday. I’ve spent so much time and effort writing about my dad for my book about his war, but Mom was always a very important part of my life.
Also known as Shirley Margaret Thorness (nee Snydal), Mom was born in Minot, North Dakota, the daughter of a fur trader. Sounds pioneer, doesn’t it? But the fur trade business continued into the middle of the 20th century. Might be going still, as far as I know.
Shirley was a woman with a big heart, many talents and significant achievements. After graduating high school, she moved with her family from Minot to Williston (where I also grew up), and she took an office job and lived at home during World War II. Her youngest sibling Larry, who was a toddler when they settled in Williston, enjoyed the attention of three sisters at home at that time.
“Patty played with me, Bev sang and taught me songs, but Shirley was the one who read to me,” he says. “She opened the world of A.A. Milne to me and I learned, I think, all the Pooh hums.” Throughout their lives, when they’d check in on the phone, he’d often begin the call with “The more it snows…tiddeley pom” and she would respond with “The more it goes on snowing.” Two more generations—her own children and her grandchildren—no doubt also recall her love of Pooh and similar warmhearted stories for kids, and also her love of sitting down with them with a good book.
Larry, who is a poet and retired teacher living in the Bay Area, also recalls Shirley’s sense of humor along with her love of word play. That silly old bear Winnie the Pooh delivered both. Consider these Poohisms: “People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.” And “I always get to where I'm going by walking away from where I have been.” How can you not crack a tiny smile?
Mom loved children, evidenced by the fact that she had nine. But wait, there’s more. Then she went on to be a teacher, filling her days by guiding gradeschoolers in the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. (Sorry, she wouldn’t want me to swap the ’ for the a.)
My siblings were born over the course of sixteen years. I’m the second youngest of the brood, with one sister three years younger. Mom had her when she was 40 years old.
Raising our gang was not an easy undertaking. During her later pregnancies, arthritis stiffened her so much that she would sometimes need to move painfully up the stairs backwards, sitting down and scooting one step at a time. There were a lot of mouths to feed and not a lot to go on. Our disabled veteran dad kept us barely afloat financially while simultaneously battling his demons, which was another challenge for her. Mom kept a big garden, a root cellar and shelves of home-canned vegetables and fruit.
Dad died from a stroke in November 1969, at the age of 57. So at the age of 46, with four of us kids still in school, Mom went to college. She famously got better grades than my older siblings who were in the same school at the same time. I can’t imagine how I would have reacted to the hallway chatter over that situation. And then she graduated, with a degree as a teacher, in three years. Normal folks take four.
While in school, Shirley held down a couple of jobs at a time. Cleaner and care assistant at the old folks’ home. Radio dispatcher. Tupperware seller. School classroom aide. I’m probably forgetting one or two.
But at the age of 50, she began her real career: teacher. She chose the rural school system that operated in the countryside around Williston. Round Prairie School was her lair, where she stood before a class of students ranging from first to eighth grade. Also sounds a little pioneer, right? The rural community grew and her class range shrunk, until ten years into it she was down to one or two grades. Fourth grade was her favorite. Having been around a lot of youngsters, I would agree. At that age, kids are old enough to be interesting but young enough that cynicism or rebellion have not yet taken hold.
Seeing her work was instructive. A teacher’s day does not end when the last student rushes out the door. After straightening out the room and prepping supplies for the next day, she could look ahead to an evening of grading papers, or more lesson planning. No rest for the wicked, she would say. Quite the opposite, I see now.
She retired after twenty years in front of the blackboard, but not really. She carried on as a substitute teacher well into her 70s, and she tutored special cases at home. And then her world got significantly smaller. She had fewer and fewer visits from aging friends, and more funerals to attend. Her body broke down and she eventually became housebound. It pained her that she could not get out to her Lutheran church, where she had, for many years and not surprisingly, also been teaching and in service of that community. Mom would follow along with the service being broadcast on the radio, and during the week her pastor would sometimes stop by to visit and administer communion.
She ended up in that old folks’ home where she’d worked, but this time as a resident. Once she recovered from the pain and shock of leaving her home, she made the best of it: she again became a teacher. This time she taught people at the other end of their life how to paint, something she’d always done as a relaxing avocation. Once when I visited her there, we had lunch in the dining room, surrounded by paintings by her students festooning the walls.
I remember Mom as often lonely in her later years, but I also recall her maintaining a rich inner life, primarily due to her abiding love of books, wordplay and games.
She read constantly, and while she craved a good mystery (Agatha Christie was the top), she sought stories with characters you could love, or laugh along with. The antics of Wooster and Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse tickled her, while she lived vicariously through the wise sleuthing of Precious Ramotswe, Botswana’s premier female detective, in the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith. I took a victory lap on that one—I introduced the books to her.
When I visited, I always saw an open book nearby as well as a crossword puzzle book, dog-eared with a puzzle half solved—in ink. And there was always a pile of board games, dominoes and card decks on the hutch next to the dining table. She was always ready for a match. She often triumphed, but never (okay rarely) gloated.
As her birthday fell during the celebration season, it would sometimes be the occasion for a family gathering, and she liked nothing better than a full house at Thanksgiving or Christmas. She loved a big feast and would spend days in the kitchen preparing the spread. Although she decried the trend toward ever-earlier decorating and shopping for Christmas, once the turkey was well finished she’d unload box after box of holiday decorations, which were deployed to seemingly every surface in her home. The windowsills got elves, the piano had a creche and the bathroom received colorful towels and special soap. Even the doorknobs would have something dangling.
In her later years when the gatherings shrunk, so did the decorating, and she stopped getting a fresh Christmas tree, opting instead for a small artificial one. That saddened me more than possibly anything else. A couple of years, when Susie and I took the 24-hour Amtrak ride to Williston to spend Christmas with her, I went out scrounging and found a last-minute tree, in one instance someone else’s castoff, and dragged it home to bring some needles onto the carpet. I called the Charlie Brown-like tree Scrappy, and in her honor, wrote it an ode. Alright, since you’ve read this far and since it’s the holidays, here it is:
Ode to Scrappy
There was a little spruce lying in the alley.
We spied him from the car and named him Scrappy,
then flung him in the trunk so furtively–
did Santa look away, or did he see?
He had been cast aside – he couldn’t win;
there was no tree-stand for him at the inn.
His knees were weak, his voice a squeak,
He flung off needles – he was past his peak.
With our red fire extinguisher at the ready
We screwed him to a stand and made him steady.
We took care stringing lights upon his limbs
then fastened our old baubles onto him.
He took it all with dignity, ol’ Scrappy
And stood watch o’er our presents with no nappy.
He made our holiday glowing but not sappy…
on Christmas eve both tree and we were happy.
Mom would have turned 100 today. She probably would have quoted the old joke that “Old teachers never die, they just lose their class.” Which in her case, could not have been further from the truth.
And now, for something completely different. Mom tolerated a lot of her childrens’ music, spanning the hippie to the disco years. I was pleasantly surprised when she slipped the greatest hits of Bachman Turner Overdrive into the 8-track player in our Dodge Polara. We rocked down the highway.
Beautiful tribute to your mom, Bill. I love the photos too. 🙂