Mom

Mom

My mother, Norma Zimmerman, passed away Saturday morning at almost 89 years of age.  Her death was sad yet joyous because of her strong Christian faith.  She was one of those women who was very intelligent and full of energy who nonetheless chose to be a stay-at-home farm wife rather than the many career paths she could have had.  But in so doing, she influenced a lot of things she would have otherwise had less chance to do. 

            The keen desire of any Christian parent is to see that their children catch the faith.  Mom taught Sunday schools and constantly taught me.  When I was 8 years old,  I had a very large dog named Boozer (Name is a long story).  Boozer was my best friend (Ask any 8 year old boy about his dog.) And one day the neighbnor blamed my dog for killing his sheep and demanded we kill the dog.  I was distraught.  My cool-headed dad had a plan, move the dog to my grandfather’s ranch 10 miles away and thus avoid our neighbor.  Still, it broke my heart. So Mom came to me and said, “All things work together for good for those who are in Christ”  That’s Romans 8:28.  And you may think this was an odd thing to say to an 8 year old lamenting his dog.  But the passage stuck in my head. 

            And indeed things did work out for good.  I could visit my loyal friend almost every day.  The dog became for my granddad what was surely the model for those “Hank, the Cow Dog” books yet to be written by some guy  in Texas.  Boozer was in charge of Ranch Security, killing snakes and varmints on an almost daily basis and bringing the milk cows home each night. Once my pre-school cousin, Kirk, was attacked by a cocky rooster.  Granddad saw it and simply said, “Sic ‘em, Booze!”  That dog took that rooster around the corner of the henhouse so fast—I didn’t know you could make a chicken go that fast—and he flew up into the catalpa tree and spent the rest of the day there in mortal fear. All things work together for good.

            As a single parent, I moved back home for a couple years with my parents with my daughter Paula.  Susan, my 14-year old sister and I used to complain a lot about there being nothing to do in Alta Vista, Kansas.  Which was true, but beside the point, my mother figured.  She told us to stop griping and throw a party, a barbecue, or whatever and have some friends over.  To our youthful amazement, it worked.  We began having parties that attracted not just he invitees but a lot of other kids with nothing to do.  One evening my buddies and I were munching down on some coconut crème pie.  One friend was in Culinary Arts.  “Who made the pie?”  My sister, I explained.  “Wow! She’s just 14?  I’m impressed!”  And then he began to tell about how you have to mix pie crust dough just right and roll it out gently.  If you roll it too much, you get shoe-leather pie crust.  All I could think about were the many sessions Susan had making pie under the critical eye of my mother.  So all things work together for good.  Ask Susan’s husband Brad what his favorite desert is.  And Susan still throws a party, only they are called “state conventions”.  She is president of Oklahoma LWML.

            When I was 6, Mom said, “Do you want to build a tree house?” I was thrilled.  So we found some scrap lumber.  I’’m sure it was a ‘plant’. And she sent me downtown for some nails.  I remember going into Houtz Hardware and asking for 25 cents worth of nails.  “Common or box?” Bill Houtz asked.  I was terrified over having to answer such a question, so I confessed that I was going to build a tree house.  “Oh, you’ll want common nails,” he said and sent me home with an enormous bag of nails that I could hardly carry.  Thus began a career of building tree houses all over a small town of 400 residents. I procured more scrap lumber where Bat Nelson was building his new house from the benevolent carpenters. I suppose I owe apologies to whoever is the tree trimmer in Alta Vista these days for all the nails left in old trees. Mom had been an interior design major in college.  After we moved out to the farm, the farmhouse got re-decorated and landscaping was added that must have made us the talk of the area.  Most farmers lived in humble shacks, with not much care given to appearance.  Not so with our house and farmstead.  We were somewhat of a showplace.

            So now I think of all the businesses we have done in Ponca City, the one that worked best was the lowly art of being a professional landlord and flipping properties.  But if you are taught a good design sense it pays.

            She was also a journalism major in college and she worked as the proofreader of the Manhattan Mercury.  By the way they still miss her skills at the Mercury.  When I was in grad school in Manhattan, the Mercury arrived one day with a big picture of the Editor receiving an award. It was captioned, “Mercury receives award for the best ewspaper in Kansas.”  At one point, she became editor of our small town newspaper, The Alta Vista Journal, for a short time.  But what I remember is the Editor-in-chief standing over me as a wrote for school.  She would take a critical eye.  “You have already said that before.  Take that sentence out.  And check the usage of this word.”  And I would complain, “But Mom, the teacher said our essay has to be 400 words, and now you have made it 200 words.”  “Good.  Now you can do more research and write more. Brevity is the soul of wit.”  I think of those sessions often as I write press releases and newspaper articles and letters for the successful state representative I work for.  Writing is a craft. You have to practice it a lot if you want to do it well, Mom would say.

            I’m not exactly sure how she wound up editing the Alta Vista paper for a spell.  We didn’t own the paper, but she wrote an editorial the previous year that shook the town.  Night lighting was being installed over the baseball field.  Now everyone could play night games.  Alll the people in town were congratulating themselves with this wonderful addition.  But the farm and ranch kids didn’t play little league ball.  They had chores to do.  So it was a benefit for the in-town folks.  Mom wrote a letter to the editor suggesting that the $2500 could have been spent so much better by putting storm windows on the drafty limestone school.  Indeed, classroom temperatures had dropped to 54F the previous winter.  This created a bit of revolution of protest amid the PTA. Parents came forward demanding to know why they had to dress their girls in corduroy pants under their skirts.  And why did kids have to study with coats on?  A fund drive for storm windows was started and the next year, we got our new school storm windows.  That year the editor of the paper also had some health problems.  Guess who was tapped for the job.

            No one was more organized than my mother.  She used to call me and ask something like, “What are you doing on August 8?”  I never knew what to say.  Did she mean next summer or the next calendar year?  I hadn‘t even planned tomorrow yet.  When she got sick, Susan took over her date book and sure enough, found that Dad had doctor appointments he needed to attend to in April.  She had made the appointments last fall. When she was so sick and could hardly talk he would bend over her so they were face to face to communicate.  One night in the nursing home, he had a bill in his pocket sticking out and she managed to pluck it out of his pocket despite her weakness.  “No Norma, that’s the bill for your hairdresser.  I have to pay it.” And he reached for the bill.  She pulled it away defiantly.  The Hispanic nurse standing next to me gave me a quizzical look.  “Oh just a German family,” I told her. “Wife pays all the bills.”  At which the nurse cracked a huge grin.  “We need to learn this,” she noted.  But in fact Mom was quite the accountant around our house.  Farming is a team sport. 

            Those are a few of the things that worked together for good.  But Romans 8:28 says not just ‘a few things’ or even ‘many things’  but “All things work together for good for those who are in Christ.”  God has all history in the palm of His hand.  History is His Story.  He will tell us His Story someday soon.