If There Is Pinochle In Heaven......

On the 15^th my mother will have been gone from Earth for 5 years, and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t get the urge to pick up the phone and give her a call.

I was blessed with a very strong willed and dynamic mother. As I grew up, I knew that her “yes” meant “yes”, and her “no” most definitely meant “no”. She was a strong disciplinarian when all of the kids were home. I was slow to learn to appreciate her gift of providing such a strong moral compass when I was little. I later appreciated her values and rules, and realized they were necessary as she juggled raising four children, helping my father with the farm, and managing the budget.

It wasn’t until the rest of my siblings left the home, that a really learned to appreciate mom. By the time I was 10-years-old, my brother was nearly finished with college, one of my sisters had chosen business school and my other sister had chosen to start a family. I was the baby of the nest, and was I truly blessed. I found out that my mother was one of the funniest, intellectual, and caring people I would ever encounter.

Mom was an artist. She played the accordion and she painted. Her avocation was the music, but her passion was her painting. She would paint for hours mixing oils or acrylics, moving across the canvas and bringing color to the world. She would whistle as she painted.

We had an old sofa in the studio that we called a paint room. I would often lay on it watching her paint as she whistled a hauntingly beautiful melody. I would soon find myself asleep. The sense of safety, the gentleness and the love that exuded from the paint room comforted me more than any other place.

It may have stemmed from her artistic mind, but mom was always in the process of changing the look of our home. She would paint abstract murals in the downstairs bathroom, design the plans to add a room on to the north of the house, and even make certain that dad knew how many electrical outlets she wanted. Mom would have been happy with an electrical outlet every four feet along every wall of the house, and dad would compromise her down to a couple on each wall.

One time, I was coming in from irrigating and saw mom carrying an axe into the house. I had some chores to do, so I completed them before I went into the house. There were smashing noises, noises of falling plaster, and sure enough, the house was under construction. Mom was wailing away at a wall in the kitchen, taking big chunks out of the wall between the kitchen and the hallway leading to the laundry room.

“Mom, what are you doing?”

She looked at me, with a guilty look, sat down and leaned on the axe. Her hands wrapped over the blade, and her face resting on her hands. She had sweat running down her temple.

“I’ve always hated this wall here.”

The response was so calmly stated and so factual, that I started laughing. I laughed and I laughed. Soon she was smiling and I told her that I would go get dad so we could remodel the wall. Heck, we had to as she had 5 square feet of it spread across the floor.

Mom loved Pinochle. She was a wiz at cards and I felt cheated if I could not be her partner. She would put those reading glasses on, and I almost swore they were  x-ray glasses because she knew where those cards were. When I had mom as my partner, I don’t think I ever lost.

Mom would laugh. Oh, my how she would laugh. It would rock the whole house. Sometimes, when a humorous remark was met with laughter, we would feed off each other’s laughter, and the longer we laughed the funnier the memory of the remark became. Mom would be laughing while holding her side crying, and laughing all the louder.  It was an epidemic, no one could walk into the room with bursting into tears laughing, and at times one needed to run outside just to get their wits about them. It would abate into a false sense of control, then mom would chuckle and it all would start again.

My mother’s favorite book in the Bible was the book of James, and her preacher thought that was likely because she and James were so very much alike. With mom, things were always black and white. There was right and there was wrong. There was no place for situation ethics.

Mom was baptized into Christ in the 1970s. She had, like my father, been raised a Catholic. In fact, she would tell us stories, how, as a child, she would be crawling under the bed as the KKK came by with guns firing into her parents’ house. Her family had a double strike against them, they were immigrants and they were not Protestants. It was hard for my mother to put aside the Catholic faith as she started studying the Bible, after all, her parents were persecuted as Catholics. After uncovering every stone, researching scripture after scripture, she ultimately made the decision that the Bible was indeed the Word of God, and she had to either put her faith in the Bible or put her faith in the priest. At nearly the same time, our entire family became Christians. I think back to those days, and think how hard it must have been for both mom and dad, to forsake family traditions, mom was in her late 40s and dad was in his early 50s.

Once she made that decision, there was no looking back, she was a devoted Christian, reading the Bible daily, working to convert friends, and providing a new and improved moral compass for the family. This compass indeed had similar values of right and wrong that we grew up with, but with meaning, understanding, and most of all compassion.  My mom and my dad, with a couple of Christian friends, purchased an old mortuary in Basin (our home town), remodeled it, hired a preacher, and established a presence of a New Testament Church in the community. I am proud to say that they had done more for spreading the word of God than most couples.

In her last days, she was looking forward to shedding the corruptible body and to take on the incorruptible. She provided the best lesson and the hardest lesson for me to learn. It was a lesson of how to look forward to death. Mom was ready for the next remodeling job. She broke through that wall from the here to the hereafter on February 15, 2007, waiting until after my sisters’ birthdays on February 14^th, to take her last breath.  

So, my question to my mom is as follows – “Mom, is there Pinochle in Heaven? , If so, and when the time comes, can I be your Pinochle partner?”