Legacies and gentle adventures
I was lucky. I had two mothers-in-law.
That reads like the setup for a Minnie Pearl joke on “Hee-Haw,” but it’s true. I came to love and admire them both. They shared a tremendous drive to help other people, especially those overlooked by society.
My husband’s mom, Phyllis, was an elemental force. Barely five feet tall, she backed down to no one. As a mother of four, she earned her master’s degree in social work from Denver University. She spent most of her professional life in Providence, Rhode Island, where she advocated fiercely for children in dangerous circumstances. She was threatened with violence for her efforts, once at knife point while removing a child from an abusive home.
Did I mention she was beautiful? Dark brown eyes and a boho sensibility. Did I share that standing in her kitchen, chopping vegetables for Szechuan stir fry, remains one of the best memories of my young married life? Her cancer was in remission then.
We shared some gentle adventures, long drives where she talked about her past and shared stories of my husband as a boy.
One night we decided to go out for dinner and a movie. We had salad at a trendy sandwich spot. We were coffee devotees before that was a daily status item, so we searched out a niche coffee shop near the theater. The brew was wonderful, a rich Colombian blend, made better by the satisfaction of after-dinner conversation and a girls night out.
When we got to the theater—“E.T.” was playing—we didn’t want popcorn, so we lingered outside with our coffee. Then, with a twinkle in her eye, she said, “Oh, let’s take them in. We’ll be fine.”
The young man tearing tickets didn’t stand a chance. I watched her charm him into agreeing that two women, out for the evening, should of course be allowed to break the rules and sip their “purchased elsewhere” coffee while cheering on an unassuming extra-terrestrial who only wanted to get home from the California suburbs.
He grinned into her brown eyes and waved us through.
Something about watching her in that scenario was tremendously endearing to me. If we had met at work, with no other ties, I believe we would have become friends. She had a way of drawing people in.
My husband’s dad and stepmom, Paul and Kathy, were fixtures of our married life. They met us once near Estes Park for a week of camping. Kathy was a marvelous cook. We ate better around the campfire that week than we ate at home.
No one could inspire fits of laughter like she could. One late afternoon, something struck the two of us as funny, and the harder we tried to stop laughing, the stronger our fits of hilarity. I blame Kathy.
If you’re a bystander, enduring someone else’s hysterical laughter wears thin pretty quickly. Paul (the M.D.) turned to my husband (the deputy sheriff), and said quietly: “You know, between the two of us, we could make it look like an accident.”
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