Part 1: A torch is passed

Florence Rogers in the late 1960s

I inherited Mattie, and it took me a while to figure out that she was truly a legacy.  I’d never thought of a dog in that way, and she was so funny-looking with her big multi-directional ears that I just set about enjoying her. I thought I was doing her owner Gerry a favor, giving her some peace of mind about Mattie. But it was so much deeper than that.

Gerry had known my mother for nearly 30 years. When I called in 1990 to tell her that Mom had died, she said, “I’ve lost my best friend.” “Me, too,”  I replied.  She knew she couldn’t attend the funeral because she was the caretaker of her Alzheimer-stricken husband, and he wouldn’t sit still. But she came to the house to visit, and we sat and talked while he paced around the dining room table. (Later she wrote of him, “We eat promptly at high noon or the pacing picks up speed.”) She’d somehow managed to bake cookies for us, and as always her bone-dry humor helped everyone there.

I’d known Gerry since I was about 12, and I’d always thought she had a tough life. Her husband S.T. was what they euphemistically called “a handful” even before his illness: a gambler who drank too much and seemed oddly childlike. I remember his insisting that the sand dollar my brother and I had found on the beach was manufactured, because nothing that perfect could’ve been made by nature. We rolled our adolescent eyes at each other behind his back.

Their only child was mentally retarded and as he got older he would occasionally grow violent, a young man with a six year old’s temper. I overheard my mother talking about the trouble Gerry was having finding a place that would take good care of Tommy, how upset she was that she no longer could do it herself. He was three years older than I was. I met him once: he was short and stocky and kept to himself. She drove 40 miles to bring him home for weekend visits until the month before she died.

She told me once that her mother had sat up with her the night before her wedding, begging her not to marry S.T. But, she said, she was 19 years old and itching to get out of the sticks of Missouri. S.T. was in the Army, the war was over and she wanted to see the world.

She learned the hard way: by the time I met her, no one could ever have accused her of being naïve. When I was growing up she read widely, smoked constantly, dressed like a million bucks. She was funny, thoughtful and sharply observant.

I kept thinking about her saying she’d lost her best friend. I was so sad about my mother’s death and Gerry’s words rang so true. I wrote her a note and asked if she’d like to keep in touch. She wrote right back and said sure.

Her letters were small treasures. One of the treasures included this picture of my mom. She wrote infrequently but somehow her timing was always perfect. It seemed like her letters arrived when I most needed them. She often said the same thing about mine: that my letter arrived when S.T. was driving her particularly crazy, or when she was feeling blue.

It was as if my mother had passed the torch to Gerry, who graciously took on the task of making me feel better. It was quite a torch.

“I’ve thought so many times, with regret, that I shouldn’t have unloaded my problems on Florence’s shoulders. I hope she realized that she literally saved my life emotionally. I found out rather quickly that even good friends tended to disappear into the woodwork when I tried to talk to them about my problems. She was the only one who would listen for hours and even encourage me to talk. I don’t think I could have made it without her. She’d tell me, ‘You call me any time, and if you don’t, I’ll call you.’ And she did. She was such a rare and wonderful friend and I miss her so much.”

Gerry often told me I reminded her of my mother, an immeasurably powerful reassurance. She took a keen interest in my life and offered gentle advice when I asked for it. Her letters often started with an apology for not writing sooner. One of my favorites was, “Talk about macadamizing the road to you know where!”

Always, always she wrote with an acerbic wit that made me laugh:

“As far as S.T.’s peculiarities, I deal with them as I do other unpleasantness – I ignore them. Of course, I’m at the point where I ignore so much I’m unaware of most things going on around me.”

“For a prosperous 1994, start buying stock in disinfectant cleaning materials and Attends, the adult diapers. You can see what subjects take up a great deal of my time and thoughts.”

“We had quite a little stir last time Tommy was home. S.T. kept grabbing Tommy’s art pencils or whatever took his fancy and running off to his bedroom with the prize. About the 15^th time he grabbed something Tommy walked in and really yelled at him. S.T. put up his fists and started circling around and I jumped between them. I had visions of taking my 45 year-old son and his 73 year-old father to the Emergency Room and explaining to the ER personnel, ‘they were fighting over the crayons.’ That would have given them something to talk about during their coffee break.”

(S.T., ‘the lovable little pack rat, the bane of my life,’ constantly sneaked things and hid them.) “I always felt like I was just a tiny step away from complete, screaming insanity when things kept disappearing. It did nothing for my self-confidence.”

“The door between the garage and house decided it didn’t want to close any more. I fixed that on a temporary basis by propping an old mattress I had set aside for the Salvation Army up against it. Certainly added to the already delapidated décor of the house.”

“The buzzards took care of most of the (deer) remains. At my age it’s unsettling, to say the least, to wake up in the morning with a flock of buzzards circling overhead.”

Her last years would have been much harder without Mattie. As his illness became worse, S.T. had a tendency to wander off. Once the police called Gerry to tell her they’d picked him up walking in downtown San Antonio, many miles from home. Gerry had no idea of how he got there, but after that she hid his shoes. (“In fact, I hid his dress shoes so well I can’t find them now. Sometimes I think Alzheimer’s disease is contagious.”) He liked to keep busy, so she gave him a rake and he swept the yard. Then she adopted Mattie.