Constable: Losing my mom is hard, but reflecting on her good 92-year-old life brings me comfort
My Mom died Tuesday. As much as I admire her 92 years of life, I remember as a kid thinking life had cheated her at times.
Lois Evaughn Schembs was born on a farm outside of Remington, Indiana, on Jan. 28, 1927, to farmer Jesse Schembs and his wife, Floretta Casey. Mom never said they were poor, but she did tell stories of running to the outhouse in the middle of winter nights and being happy to find a Sears catalog instead of just corn cobs. She'd heat an iron in the fire and use it to warm her bed sheets, but she'd still wake up some mornings to find the water frozen in her glass next to the bed.
She was so smart as a child, she skipped second grade. Then she got scarlet fever and missed so much school, she had to repeat third grade. Good in math and English, she was salutatorian of her Class of 1945 at Remington High School, where she also played the drums.
Of course, old classmates of hers just called her "the prettiest girl in school." They say she should have been queen of the Fountain Park Chautauqua in Remington, but the judges declared it a tie and Mom lost the coin flip.
Second in her class. Second to the queen. And second-class citizen when it came to education, I thought. College was never an option for her, so she took a job in bookkeeping with Sherman White and Co., a buyer of farm goods in Goodland. That's where she met my dad, Willy Constable, on the day he came home from World War II and stopped by in uniform to see his sister, who introduced him to my mom. He was more than 10 years older, and Mom remembers being mortified when he wore his fedora on their first date to the movie theater, as if he were an old man.
Dad proposed on their third date. Three years later, Mom accepted. But first, she and her younger sister, Dorothy, crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the steerage compartment of a steamship for a grand adventure in Ireland. That took courage. Mom came home and married my dad on March 13, 1950, on what happened to be the first day in weeks that it was too wet for farmers to work. The last-second nuptials meant Willy's father, Bert, skipped the wedding to attend his previously scheduled town board meeting. A rainy spring extended my parent's honeymoon.
Mom gave birth to daughters Sally and Nancy, and then me and my brother, Bill. Mom insisted that all of us kids learn to play piano and sing alongside Dad and her in the choir at the Goodland Presbyterian Church. My sisters played organ and piano for church and countless weddings. My brother became a gifted musician and keyboard player who charmed crowds with his music. As the only person in my family who never got paid to perform music, I might be the only kid in history whose mother asked him to stop taking piano lessons. We both thought that was a good idea.
Mom and Dad were key members of the South Newton High School Production Company and got all of us kids interested in theater. They took us to Christmas concerts at Purdue University. But they also had good seats for Boilermaker football games, where we'd wrap our feet in plastic bread wrappers to keep warm and Mom would open her stash of homemade chocolate-chip goodies only when our team needed her "third-down cookies." Her only attempt at athletics was standing on her head on her birthdays.
Mom quizzed us on current events and political news at supper and set up an Electoral College voting system for family decisions, with everybody getting votes depending on age. A parental bloc defeated any move by the minority children, but any split opened the door for new alliances. Mom filled our home with books, music, humor and love.
An avid reader, political junkie and crossword wiz, she used to quote from New York Times stories and talk about writing her own book. "I'd call it 'Hamburger and Sex,'" she said. "Because I know hamburger, and I need sex to make it sell."
In addition to cooking our meals and running the household, Mom was the driving force in getting all four kids to go to college. But she didn't just inspire her own kids. She had an uncanny ability to draw people to her and consider her their second mom. People confided in her about sexual issues, drugs, abuse, alcoholism and dreams.
She lived on a farm in a conservative, heavily Republican, all-white community, but became a go-to person for anyone from outside those boundaries. She and Dad visited Jimmy Carter's church in Plains, Georgia. Mom and her friend Ruthann were once in a photo on the front of The Indianapolis Star talking with Jesse Jackson after they made the trip to hear the civil rights leader speak. Mom donated to Barack Obama, slapped an Obama bumper sticker on her car in 2008, and probably deserves credit for making Indiana a blue state that year. No one so much as teased her.
Once we kids were out of her hair, she focused more on herself. She and her friends had frequent Lunch Bunch outings. In her 70s, she took art classes and became an accomplished watercolor artist, winning a couple of ribbons and landing one piece in a juried art show. She got back to her drums, too, playing snare drum in the Newton Jasper Community Band from her early 70s through her late 80s.
Lovely and elegant are words often used in descriptions of her. Always polite, Mom never swore or spoke badly about anyone. She never let us kids say the S-word, whether that meant "stupid" or "shut up."
She cared for the old ladies in the church. She cared for her parents. She cared for my dad before he died in 2003. She cared for my brother before he died in 2010. She cared for others her whole life. My thoughts about what she could have been if she had been given the chance vanished. Life didn't cheat her of opportunities. It let her forge her own. She had grace, smarts, love and a wonderful life. And we were lucky to be part of it.