My Hero Wore Fur

Not all super heroes wear a cape. Mine wore a mink coat.

First grade Christmas party.  My mother, then 22 years old, brought snow white cupcakes with red sprinkles to a room full of rowdy ready-for-Santa first graders on the last day before Christmas break in 1964.  She looked like she stepped off the pages of Teen Magazine dressed in pink stirrup pants, fluffy sweater, gold sparkly shoes and a mink coat.

Actually, she wore a mouton coat, but in the eyes of these first graders, it was a mink coat.  Like the one Marilyn Monroe wore when she surprised the world and up and married old Joltin’ Joe.

My friends asked me if she was a movie star.  Simple answer:  How could she be a movie star when she’s my mama?

She was 16 years old when I was born.  Just 10 months and 13 days after she married my daddy.  Standing in front of a justice of the peace in a gray suit borrowed from her sister, my mother was a child bride.  I have pictures of me as a baby with my teenage mother’s favorite doll, Annie Oakley.  My daddy gave her that doll… and me.  They went on to have 4 more children and Annie Oakley was forgotten somewhere along the way.

Standing just north of 5 ft. tall, mama was not like all the other mothers.  She was pretty with her dark curly hair, perfect complexion and twinkling eyes. She painted her lips in Avon Red Velvet and always smelled like Evening in Paris perfume.  On Saturdays, we watched American Bandstand and sang and danced around the living room with Dick Clark and the American Bandstand Dancers.  When it came time for my daddy to get home from work, she washed our faces and combed our hair and stood at the window waiting for him to drive up.   He came home to her every single day for 55 years.

Super heroes do cry sometimes.   My mama has lost 3 of her 5 children and 7 of her 11 siblings.  Her beloved husband passed away suddenly six years ago.  She doesn’t laugh as much and her brown eyes are a little less bright.

American Bandstand has been replaced with The Young and the Restless as must-see-TV and her glamorous mouton coat is in storage at my house.  The last bottle of Evening in Paris that my daddy gave her sits on my dresser, empty now.  I still occasionally take the top off just to get a whiff of my childhood.

My mama is no less a hero today than she was that day she made her 6 year old daughter the envy of all the other first graders.  She is still beautiful with dark curly hair, a perfect complexion and, yes, sometimes Red Velvet lips.