I sit on the deck of the Airbnb where I have encamped for the duration of my Missouri stay.  The air grows heavy with the threat of spring rain.  From the small settee, I can see a heavy flower pot flanked by bricks balanced on the top of the privacy fence and a china frog that appears to be staring at itself in a mirror.  I’m not mad about it.  With no rental car, and no traveling companion, I find myself momentarily in isolation contemplating the city where I spent the first twenty-two years of my life.

I have already had quite good coffee and an off-menu breakfast at a place down the street with two siblings, a sister-in-law, and an old friend of the brother whom we laid to rest yesterday.  The barista took my peculiar diet in stride to create a vegan, gluten-free  sandwich and served it to me despite her obvious desire to make it fancy.  The others got egg bites, bacon-and-cheese sandwiches, and a shared cinnamon roll.  We all had strong coffee.  The entire affair felt very Midwestern.  At one point, I closed my eyes and let their slight twangs wash over me like cool water in a southern Missouri stream.

I’m staying in a converted stable.  The couple who owns it lives in the big house next door, on an immaculately gentrified city street in south St. Louis.  This place is just four blocks from my brother Frank’s home and a scant half-block from the park in which we gathered yesterday.  The grime and glitz of the city meet and mesh here.  Tall trees rise above the lingering scent of exhaust fumes that drift over from Kingshighway.   

Yesterday I rode past the university at which I misspent the shank of my teen years.  The bars where I drank closed years ago, I’m sure, but others have bloomed to replace them.  I got a Bachelors in psychology with a minor in poli sci by dint of counting credits to determine what my major could be after I dropped out of the education department.  I had enough psych classes to finish a semester early, the deciding factor.  The heavy weight of alcohol consumption threatened to destroy me.  I knew I had to leave town or risk a further decline from which I might not return.  I took my degree and fled to Boston.

Less than a year later, I huddled in a corner of my mother’s car for the return trip, rescued by my oldest brother Kevin.  Everything I owned fit into the back seat except a metal rocker, which we crammed into the Maverick’s miniscule trunk.  I would start graduate school a few months later; then law school; and eventually, bludgeoned my way through three decades in Kansas City from which my son can be said to have been the best souvenir.   Ten years ago, my world crumbled into shambles around me and I ran from the Midwest again, this time west to California where I seem to have finally cobbled together some kind of life.

I didn’t mean this trip to focus on me, or revisiting my past, or contemplating the choices I have made.  I came to stand with family by blood and by choice as we acknowledged the passing of my brother Mark to whatever existence follows the human experience.  I sat between his daughter Emily and my brother-in-law Larry as Frank read poetry, his own and one by Maya Angelou.  Between the recitations, he spoke to Mark, to his memory, to his virtues, to his gifts.  I listened with a focus that I did not anticipate.

At one point, Frank asked us to think of our own connection to Mark, how we remembered him, what he meant to us.  I did not see him during his last illness despite twice coming to town for that purpose.  So I have no knowledge of how he looked in his declining months.  I remember him as tall, and silent, and strong.  I found him a bit intimidating for our entire lives, though my response probably says more about me than him.  

I did not cry until Frank invited us to take a rose and put it into the ground where Mark’s ashes would be interred.  I could not stand; I gave my rose to my cousin Kathe and remained frozen in my chair, terrified of the wave of emotion that overtook me.  My grief transcends my brother’s death.  It extends to my life, my solitary existence, the messes that I have abandoned time and time again. 

Later, as I watched a hundred people mingling in Tower Grove Park, sharing stories of their friendship with my brother, I felt myself withdraw into some kind of fog — a fog from which I did not quite know how to extract myself.  

Afterwards, I went to an early dinner with my son and his girlfriend.  The gloom dissipated as the pleasant interlude unfolded.  I shook away the darkness of my self-absorption as we chatted over curated drinks and artfully prepared dishes.  By the time they brought me back to this lovely retreat, my sense of homecoming had returned, along with a strong sense of the gentle side of my brother Mark’s spirit.  A kind of ease settled on me; I slept better than I had in the anxious hours of my first night here.  I carried that peace with me to breakfast today.   I cling to it still, here, in this charming studio, on a lovely street, in the old enduring city of my childhood home.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Bricks and plant in a simple arrangement.

Frog and mirror,

The grey Sunday sky.

I come from a long line of amazing mothers.

My father’s grandmother bequeathed me the name that I bear today but I never met her.  She moved to St. Louis after her husband died in New Orleans and lived with her married daughter and son-in-law in Millwood, a small unincorporated area in West St. Louis County.  In photographs, she stands tall and a bit grim, behind the groupings of her grandchildren.  But on a shelf in my tiny house, I have a photo of the young married Corinne Hahn Hayes and her new spouse, looking sweet and hopeful. 

Her daughter Beulah died during my sophomore year of college.  I recall her as a  grande dame,  an elegant lady who took control of the family business after her husband’s early death in 1945.  She kept her many children afloat and launched most of them to successful careers.  She sent us matching pajamas and boxes of food at Christmas.  She serenely graced the head of the table while her maid served us tiny individual boxes of cereal when we rode the bus to her apartment in the city.  I have no photographs of Grandma Corley, but somewhere in my jewelry box, I have a cameo that must have been hers.  I used to have a string of gold beads from her but they broke and I lost them years ago.  She once mentioned, in my presence, that her sons who went to war had come home quite different than they left.  The set of her face told me that the change had not been for the better.

We spent most of our childhood with my mother’s side of the family, nurtured by her Austrian mother  Johanna Ulz Lyons, and grandmother, Bibiana Ulz, whom we called Mom.   These resilient women twinkled and smiled when we visited but had backbones like steel girders.  They, too, carried the weight of their broods, cooking, cleaning, holding the hands of crying children, and seeing to the family finances. 

Nana had a successful run as an area representative for Montgomery Wards before starting a hearing aid business with my grandfather.  She taught me to sing in a low voice, to boldly relax on the porch in a nightgown after sunset, and to make my bed “as tight as a drum and as neat as a pin, so one could bounce a quarter off of it”.  I’ve lost that last art, to be honest, but I often sit outside late at night wrapped in a  robe.  I drink tea and think of Nana in her nylon slip on their back porch in Chatham, Illinois, quietly rocking in the dark as the summer breeze carried the scent of newly mowed grass across the yard

The legacy of these women simultaneously haunts and comforts me.    From the first moment that I laid tearful eyes on my baby boy, I dreaded failure.  No matter how I strained, I could never quite get everything as right as I remember experiencing motherhood during my own childhood. I made schmarrn as my mother and grandmother had done.  I cooked casseroles and read his favorite books and taught him to ride a bike.  We took trips and played soccer and did volunteer work together.   I filled his glass piggy bank with pennies, a piggy bank just like the one that I had as a child.  I took him to Disney World and the zoo and to Chicago to meet his aunt and cousins.  

I do not know if any of it made a difference.  Did I create enough sweet memories of childhood for him to cherish?  I do not know.  I might never know.  I admire the man that my son has become, but most of that came from his own effort.  I know him well enough to know that he would thank me for what I got right and forgive me for the mistakes.    Forgiving myself comes less easily.

We live far apart these days, him in Chicago and me in California.  He calls often, and we speak of small things.  Anything larger has already been said and needs no further elaboration.  Being the mother of Patrick Charles Corley has been the best and most cherished gift that the universe could ever have given me.  I only hope that I did him justice and did not disappointment him too much.  I know that the women who taught me themselves had flaws. I feel certain that they regretted choices along the way.  In the end, all of us just put our best feet forward, one step at a time, walking each other home, with love, in gratitude, and always in the hope that we contributed something beneficial to the legacy of which we are an everlasting part.

Happy Mother’s Day.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Me and my mother

Lucille Johanna Lyons Corley

Me and my son

Three sets of mothers and sons doing volunteer service one Christmas

Mom Ulz (background), Nana, and my sister Joyce