Memories of Mom

By Philip C. Chalk

Park Cities People, May 1983

In early 1960, a PhD candidate in Boulder, Colorado and his young wife were in agreement: They wanted four children, boy-girl-boy-girl. Six years later, knee-deep in Dr. Seuss, Buster Brown, and Gerber’s prunes, they had little time to reflect upon their remarkable success.

This achievement brought with it the unexpected thrill of three briefly simultaneous sets of diapers followed by a fourth, diapers paid for with an income built of loans, grants, the G.I. Bill, and a high school English teacher’s salary.

The twenty-three years since that telltale agreement have been exhausting, but that one-time graduate student and that one-time English teacher now have as just one form of testament to their success four sets of high school records that include one valedictorian, two national Honor Society “Blanket” Awards, one musical lead, one varsity basketball player, one National Merit Semifinalist and one Commendee, one newspaper editor, and a host of club officers and victors from speech and UIL competitions.

For four students to have done these things is nice, but not new. For two parents to be solely responsible for those four students is a feat worthy of recording, half of which I address here: my mother, Sarah Chalk.
If our family were a ballclub, she would be the General Manager, and with one secret: time. It was she who read us time and again the large, illustrated volumes of Arthurian legends, who took us for days at the library, who brought parodies of children’s literature and explained the subtle humor, who took us to watch criminal cases downtown at the courthouse and who shuffled us out when the testimony grew spicy.

As any Park Cities mother knows, there is no greater time spent than that on lessons, arranging them, driving to them, awaiting their end, and driving from them. A believer in The Lesson, she taxied the four of us through a list that will strike terror into the heart of any new parent: piano (total of twelve years); ballet (eight years); drawing (five years); painting; sculpture; drums; viola; ballroom dancing; banjo; sewing; modeling; drama; cooking; crafts; swimming (roughly sixteen summer’s worth); tennis (innumerable); and ukelele.

There were other lessons as well, namely four rounds of “student driving,” accompanied by some six wrecks, twelve tickets, and the slow, painful demise of one yellow 1973 Chevrolet Malibu, of which she was the fondest.

There were failures, of course. The most memorable and dismal was a rather dated book entitled Manners to Grow On, a chapter-or-so of which we were expected to solemnly absorb after dinners. Needless to say, we did not, yet her sides were as tired as our from laughing at the most imbecilic passages.

She was the source of our sense of humor, with favorite topics being oddball relatives, middle-aged women that relived high school through their daughters, bumbling teachers and the neighborhood’s everpresent vultures of status. She introduced us to the irony of life and often found it in us.

Once the youngest was musing aloud over her plans to be “just a mother,” which Mom, cooking nearby, received with a loud laugh and a long sigh. The limit of this derision was reached in one of those unexplainable teenage language phases, during which I referred to her while on the phone with a friend as “my old lady” which she did not tolerate even to the end of my sentence.

Certainly, we are older now, one in high school and another getting married, but she remains the same. She no longer writes and produces elementary school musicals or serves as my Cub Scout den mother, but she still clips and sends interesting articles, leaves me literature from lectures she's heard, follows me out to my car when I leave — talking to me even as I back out — and sends an occasional batch of oatmeal cookies.

This small tribute is being scrawled while I am seated here, sweltering, on the floor by the bathroom in the second-class car of a train literally brimming with Italians on holiday, going from Rome to Florence. With the exception of the young American next to me, my companions here have a uniformly unbearable odor and an infinite number of cigarettes, which neatly cap off a week of purse-snatching, lecher, and petty theft in lovely Italia. Again and again, I find myself thinking of a short letter I received from my busy mother last week, in which she reminded me, in closing, to drink some orange juice and wash my hands before meals.

Philip Chalk is a graduate of HPHS and a junior at Stanford University.