The stories we tell to one another are how we come to know each other. For as long as I can remember, my mother told stories about her life. Sometimes the stories she told were to amuse us, other times the stories were used to illustrate a point when she was chiding me or my sisters. However they were used, over time I heard many of the same stories in different contexts. So when I sat down to write out this eulogy for my mother, the stories she told, as well as my own stories about my mom came to the forefront. I offer here the stories as I remember them, the stories of my mom that have become a part of who I am.
My mom, Laverne Engbloom Neal, was born on a farm in New Sweden, not far from this building in which we have gathered here today to remember her. She was the second daughter of three girls. Laverne, Maydell and Mary: the Engbloom sisters. As my sisters and I grew up, mom told stories about the regularity of farm life. One day was a day for washing the clothes, one day was dedicated to baking the bread for the week. The bread story came up whenever my mother made molasses bread, a delicacy we always had at thanksgiving and Christmas. She thought it was funny how much we raved about the bread, because when she was a kid it was just bread: what she and her sisters wanted was the delicacy of “store bought” bread.
She told us about the extended Swedish family gatherings during the holidays where the children had to wait for the adults to finish eating. “Oh, we would be so hungry,” mom would tell us, “ and everything smelled so good, and we knew that all that would be left of the chicken was the piece that went over the fence last.” Mom told this story every holiday as I was growing up as she piled our plates with the bounty of her cooking. And my mom could cook: in addition to molasses bread, her beef and vegetable soup during the winter, cinnamon rolls, and barbecue sauces still are the standards by which I measure my own and other’s cooking. All of these recipes she had in her head. As an adult, I called her once to find out how she made the barbecue sauce and she told me, “Oh, Kelly, you know, just a little of this and a little of that until it tastes right.” Thirty years later I am still trying to figure out that recipe. Although it might have been difficult to share her recipes, mom was more than willing to feed anyone who came into our house. After I had left home and gone off to college, mom would always have more food than even I as an ever starving teenage boy could eat, waiting for me when I came home to visit for a weekend. She said, “If your home, then Nathan, Jimmy, Jackie, Ozuna and who knows who else will be here too, so I might as well make enough to feed them.”
Mom emphasized the importance of education to us as we grew up, because it had been important to her throughout her life. I don’t remember her ever telling us we had to do well and make good grades. We weren’t offered incentives or rewards if we did do well. We were just expected to do our best. Doing well in school was not something that had to be talked about, it was just something you did.
She told us how when she was growing up in New Sweden, she and her family spoke Swedish at home until Maydell, her oldest sister, started school. “Then we all spoke English, even Mama and Daddy.” Mom told us because they knew they had to speak English if they were going to do well in school. When mom finished with the amount of schooling available in the New Sweden schools, she was determined to go to high school, not something which was that common for a girl in the thirties. However the nearest high school was in Manor, and there were no school buses. Mom rode an old white plow horse several miles to Manor to finish her education. She said, when her father realized that she was serious he bought her a buggy, “so I didn’t have to ride that old stubborn horse anymore. But I tell you, they knew when those New Sweden girls came to school.”
From my mom, I inherited a love of reading and books. I remember, as a child spending many afternoons sitting in the living room of our house in Victoria on the green sofa, Jackie Brown on one side of her and I on the other, as she read for probably the hundredth or more time, The Pokey Little Puppy or Hop on Pop. Then as my own children and Donna’s boys were born, she once again sat down with a child next to her and read again and again the same story, each time reading it as if it were the first time she had ever heard how the ending of the Cat in the Hat turned out.
After graduating from Manor High, mom and her family moved into a house in Austin on Brazos, a couple of blocks away from the capitol building. She went to work as a nanny, and as a sales clerk in the lingerie department of Scarbrough Department store on Congress Ave. She said she would come home so tired from standing in high heels all day and having to bend down repeatedly to get what the customers wanted, inevitably from the bottom shelf. During the forties, She attended Nixon-Clay Business College and took part in training from IBM to become a certified keypunch operator, a skill she was able to use until she retired in the mid-eighties. After the war she met Ralph Neal, my father. She loved telling the story of how he asked her out for the first time. His brother’s-in-law, Wayne and Otto, knew mom because Dad’s sister, Daisy, would often sew dresses for my mother. Wayne and Otto thought mom was full of herself and made a bet with Ralph that he would not be able to get a date with her. He made the attempt, won the bet, and wound up marrying her in 1948. My father was fifteen years older than my mom. My dad told us that when he married my mom, his mother told him, comparing his past girlfriends to my mother, that he had flitted from one manure pile to another before finally landing on a rose.
On their first wedding anniversary, my dad brought her perfume and a dozen red roses. My mom, always pragmatic and practical, told him that the roses were nice but she would rather have a rose bush.
In Victoria, when I was a child, and later when mom moved back to Austin, she always had rose bushes in her yard. Mom spent hours and hours, days and days, digging in her garden. When she wasn’t working in the yard she would read countless magazines like Home and Garden or Southern Living, cutting out article after article about gardening so she could come back to it later. She said she loved the smell of dirt. But I think she really loved sitting in her chaise lounge, drinking iced tea like a genteel southern belle while she looked at the flowers that came from her efforts. Her gardening, like her cooking, was something she shared with as many people as were willing to take home pots full of cuttings she had transplanted, or bags of calla lilies and monkey grass. In every house I have lived in since I came to Austin thirty years ago, I have planted flowers, ground covers, and rose bushes my mom gave to me saying, “If you don’t want them give them to somebody who does.” There are several of you here who are the unknowing secondary recipients of my mother’s gardening productivity.
My mom was always busy, working on one project or another, reupholstering and refinishing furniture, weaving new cane seats for chairs she found in a junk shop, scouring garage sales for deals; up until twelve months ago, driving herself around Austin in her 1992 Red Sentra; watching the minute differences in bank interest rates so she could get the best deal when her CD’s came due; working tirelessly in her garden, and cutting out news articles for friends and family who she thought would benefit from the information contained therein. Mom was never hesitant to offer advice to others, even when they did not seek it out. She was a yellow dog democrat, and was not hesitant to speak her mind on the lack of qualifications of any Republican candidate or president. In 1964, my sister Donna drew a picture, for her second grade class, of a witches cauldron which had a stream of gold colored liquid pouring from a large crack. When her teacher asked her about it, Donna said, “My mother says Goldwater is a crackpot.” Reagan she said was too old to be president because he was as old as she was and she had a hard time remembering things, the implication being that if she had a hard time then Reagan, obviously, had to be worse. Even last August when she came out of the operation room after hip surgery, the recovery room nurse in an effort to ascertain mom’s mental acuity after being given anesthesia, asked her, “Do you know who the president is Ms. Neal?” Mom scrunched up her face in a sneer and snapped, “Who the hell would want to know him?”
Mom was nothing if not a strong willed, independent woman.
The last time I saw my mom alive, she was very sick. When she tried to talk, her speech was slurred and whispery. I couldn’t understand anything she said to me. I fed her a half-spoon at a time from the soup that the staff at Grace House had brought for her. She ate it all. As I walked out the door that evening, she told me as she had done most every time I left home, in a clear distinct voice, “Be a sweet boy.”
Every year since I was a teenager when I asked my mom what she wanted for Christmas she gave the same answer, “Sweet kids.” I’m not sure she ever got what she wanted.
In an essay about her father, a former Austinite, Marion Winick wrote, “Before you lose a parent, you think, Oh God, what will I do if one of them dies? Then it happens, and you find out you can’t do anything. You just go on. Maybe you can try to become what you miss most.”
With that in mind, We should all leave here today and take with us what we miss most about Laverne Engbloom Neal.
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