We Were Seven

My grandson Doug is one of the few recent college graduates who has a job.  He graduated in June with a degree in engineering.  He is working for a utility company in Decatur, Illinois.  He has his own apartment and is having a great time on weekends going “swing dancing” in nearby Champaign-Urbana. 

His mother – my daughter Martha – frets about his future.  She urges him to set up a 401K to start saving for retirement! 

That is a good idea. 

But I warn Doug: Life is full of surprises.  Among the many old people I know, no one says their life turned out exactly as they expected when they were young.

Take the “girls” I met at Texas State College for Women.  Bill Hill called it the “Old Maid Factory.”  We were seven young women, all but one preparing for careers, as we feared no one would ever want to marry any of us dowdy young scholars. 

The exception was Norma, a pretty girl with long brown hair and a sweet smile.  She had a sweetheart in the Navy who wrote to her every week.  She came into the room after supper, her face glowing, saying, “I have a letter from John.”  While the rest of us played bridge, Norma sat in the corner reading and reading her love letters. 

Norma majored in home economics.  She made her silk wedding dress, and in jewelry class, she fashioned wedding rings for herself and John.  Two weeks after graduation they were married.  I was a bridesmaid in the ceremony in the Methodist Church in her hometown, Weatherford, Texas.

That marriage lasted two years. 

I was the next to marry.  I moved to Chicago, where my first child, Karl, was born.  When the baby was five months old, I took him to Texas to visit my family.  Norma came to see me.  In my parents’ living room, I sat in an arm chair with the baby on my lap, and Norma sat on the couch next to her fiancé, Byron.   

In the following years the rest of us married, and six of us became mothers.  All Norma ever wanted to be was a wife and mother.  She had two children, David and Ellen.  Her daughter married and, to her delight, Norma became a grandmother of an adored little girl.  Tragically, Norma and Byron’s son David is schizophrenic.  Now in his 40's, he has a job, but he lives with his parents and will never be able to function independently. 

Like other parents with a mentally ill child, Norma became obsessed with searching for a cause. She went back to TSCW (now Texas Woman’s University) and studied the effect of environment on health.  This woman, the least scholarly of our seven, earned a Ph.D. and became a consultant on avoiding environmental hazards in schools. 

Norma experimented with herbal medicine and took heaps of vitamin pills and nutritional supplements.  She and I went together to a college reunion.  She refused to ride in my Oldsmobile because the upholstery had a “noxious” new car smell.  She gulped down a handful of pills, saying, “I take care of my health.”

Norma died this week.  Her husband, Byron Miller, was with her to the end.  The funeral is today at the Methodist Church where they were married in a quiet ceremony in the pastor’s study more than 50 years ago.  She and Byron lived in Fort Worth, my hometown, which I left 60 years ago.