For My Mother, Gale Louise Beyette, February 15,1938-August 30, 2014

My mom passed away on Saturday, August 30, 2014, at 11:11 am in Vero Beach, Florida.  She was surrounded by people who loved her, and who she loved:  her brother Kent Beyette, her sons Sharlon and Trevon Barnes, me and her other two daughters, Kimberly Adkins and Leyette Johnson, my friend Mimi Eagleton, her daughter-in-law Lisa Thompson Barnes and Lisa’s brother Noel Thompson, and Lisa’s pastor Dr. G.Timothy Womack, who had visited her every day in the hospital.

Her passing was beautiful, peaceful, and profoundly moving. 

Afterwards at Trevon and Lisa’s home, we received many offerings of food from the wonderful folks of Vero, and Mimi painted all of the women with light touches of gold glitter.  I even received a few sparkles on my finger nails.

The next day we went to Lisa’s church, First Presbyterian of Vero Beach, and had a service of celebration of her life.  Her granddaughter Emily brought one of mom’s famed silk flower arrangements to adorn the space.  Jacob Craig, the music minister, opened the service playing the uilleann pipes. We sang “Be Thou My Vision,” “In the Garden” and “How Great Thou Art.” Lisa’s sister-in-law, Robyn Thompson, sang “Near to the Heart of God/Sweet Hour of Prayer.”  Pastor Tim spoke beautifully—“Words of Memory and Hope.” Kent spoke about growing up with mom and watching her evolve from Gail to Gayle to Gale, the spelling of her name she settled on, and which he said was just right—she was a gale force wind.  All who know her know the truth of her name, and Kent described her perfectly. We closed by choosing stones painted with sweet words the night before by Robyn, and building cairns in her memory. 

On September 20, 2014, the entire family and close friends gathered outside of Houston, Texas, at  Klein Memorial Park in Pinehurst, Texas, to bury my mom’s ashes next to her sister Cecile and close to her parents Eloise and Cecil Beyette, under the beautiful, tall pine trees and in the rich red dirt of East Texas.

Trevon, Kent, and I chose the headstone the morning of the service.  Trevon’s idea was to say “A Welcome Wind.” Mine was “In Beauty I Walk.” We combined them, and Kent approved.  The headstone will be a light silvery grey marble, with a delicate frame of flowers, and inside it will say:

           

            A Welcome Wind

            Gale Louise Beyette

            February 15, 1938

                        To

            August 30, 2014

            In Beauty I Walk

Pastor Tim from Vero came to conduct the service, with my father, Reverend Wayne Barnes, assisting.  My stepmother Joyce Barnes came with my dad and beamed comfort and strength to us all. Three couples from First Baptist Church, Zachary, Louisiana, who had known Mom for many years in her role as preacher’s wife, made the 6-8 hour drive to be there:  Charlie and Juanita Massey, James and Pat McLaurin, and Phil and Mary Stagg, who made delicious loaves of chocolate chip banana bread for all of Mom’s children.  Mom’s cousin June and her husband Al Matchett came from Dallas.  Sonja Beyette came with her husband Wayne, from Beyette Road, in Magnolia, Texas—the only Beyette remaining on the family road.  Joan and Kent Beyette, super-troopers who had been there through it all in Vero, kept on trucking, and brought their joyful presence.  Kent’s son Thomas, who I hadn’t seen since he was 4 years old—he’s now 40—brought his solid, impressive self.  Calm and kind David Covington, Mom’s brother-in-law, and his lively daughter and force of nature herself, my cousin Valerie, drove in from Jackson, Mississippi.  All of my wonderful brothers and sisters and their beautiful families came:  Kim, Court, Danielle, Jared, and Angelica Adkins; Sharlon and Liz Barnes, with Sadie Barnes, and grandchildren Ronan, Mackenzie, and Hayden; Trevon and Lisa Barnes—the Rocks through all this—were there despite hospitalizations and pneumonia along the way.  Trevon’s daughter Emily Barnes and her mother April came.  Leyette, John, Aaron, and Kayla Johnson all brought their gifted selves. 

Many of us stayed at a hotel up the road, and the night before, Emily and Angelica gave themselves facials using Mom’s creams, and exclaimed, “Now we smell like Grandma Gale!”  Surely Mom was laughing and enjoying that as much as we were.  Many of us wore jewelry she had given us.

At the service, John led us all in singing “Amazing Grace.”  We sounded astonishingly good.  Leyette told me after that was because he used the right key—that they had practiced various keys in the car until they found the one that everyone could sing.

After the service, Leyette’s friend Mona from college invited us all over to her beautiful home to eat the best barbecue ever and relax and enjoy one another’s company. Here we are:

At the service, we set up a table with the beautiful wooden box from Mom’s home that held her ashes.  It was a box she had carried with her for many years.  It was a rectangular box with angled sides made of a marled reddish oak and had carved silver feet and a curved handle on top with a wreath on the front side.  My sister Kim had found a large wooden gold G in mom’s home and placed it on the table.  We also put this photo of Mom from her youth—red hair and green dress—in all her vibrant beauty and intelligence. 

We closed the service by building cairns with the same stones from the Vero service.  Afterwards we put some stones in the grave and those who wanted also took a stone.

During the service, Pastor Tim and my father spoke beautifully, and then I spoke. Following is more or less what I said.

“I was lucky enough to arrive at the hospital while Mom was still conscious, and I will never forget the way she looked when I first walked in.  She was sitting in her chair with a tray of mostly eaten food, chewing, and looking up with a big smile and laughing at an old classic Cary Grant movie on the TV.  She turned when I entered and said, “I love this old movie,” and then she realized it was me and gave me a melting look of pure love and hugged me.  That first moment, when she was enthusiastically enjoying the movie and her dinner and oblivious to everything else, like she didn’t have a care in the world, that was classic Mom—and the other look was too, in her way. We’ve all seen both of those looks—the totally absorbed in art/movie/story/furniture/curtains/clothes enthusiast and the present and deeply loving mother.

She was an enthusiastic co-creator in life.  Everything she did, she did with enthusiasm.  She knew how to give herself to something.  And she was a very generous person.

When my friend Mimi walked through her home after Mom was gone, even in the amazingly overwhelmed-with-stuff-state it was in, all she could say was, “Your mom was a creative genius.”  She was that.

The Gospel of John says, “In my Father’s house there are many mansions”…well if that’s so, then God just found himself a great interior decorator, and Mom is having a blast.  Because she had more ideas for rooms and homes than this world could hold.  Her last home is testament to that—it was like an artist’s studio, and you could see all the dreams of homes she ever held in it.  And even with all the clutter and disarray, her brilliance was evident.  Now at last she has enough space to create all she envisions, infinite space, an unlimited budget, and the deepest pockets in the universe.

Mom was extraordinarily beautiful and vibrant, and she loved beauty, and she created beauty everywhere she went.  Recently, I heard a minister urge, “Let beauty be our legacy when we leave.”  Beauty—and love—and an abundance of it! is Mom’s legacy to us all.

Until Mom’s passing, I didn’t really understand how much and how pervasively she loved us all and what an amazing accomplishment it was to bring five such different and rich and vital human beings into the world—all between the ages of 20 and 30—in 10 short years, when she was very, very young.  She was an extraordinary mother in those early years, buying all our food on a shoestring budget and cooking all our meals and imagining and creating most of our clothes, all while being a preacher’s wife right across the street from the church, where her life was an open book to all.  As we grew older and our lives developed in unpredictable ways and Mom’s wild and free nature defied conventional paths, my experience of her love became clouded, and I tended to see her as someone to worry about and to protect myself from.  She was a challenging mom, then, and all I could think was “What’s she going to do next?”

But when I saw her in the hospital that day, all I could see and feel was love—her extraordinary, unconditional, generous love for us, and all the richness she had given us—and all was forgiven, and I was no longer worried about Mom or any of us.

Mom used to love to tell the story of when Trevon was a tiny little boy learning to swim in the kiddie pool in Zachary.  It was a shallow pool only a few inches deep, where the parents watched the little ones splash and play in the water.  Trevon ran up to Mom, “Hey, Mom, watch me jump in,” and as he trotted off, she called out after him, “Be sure to hold your breath!”  Urk! He stopped suddenly, looked at the water, turned to her with a puzzled face, and said, “Where’s my breath?”

Mom’s love was like that breath--pervasive, and there just wasn’t one place to hold it.  And now at last I feel it in a way that’s permanent and everlasting—one of the many blessings she has showered us with in the past few weeks in ways I never expected.

Thank you, Mom, for being such a rich and beautiful and generous and fun and loving and intelligent and wise mother.  I am so happy you are my mother.  I will miss you—I already do.  I miss your voice and your sparkling presence.  I miss your insights. Thanks for leaving us so much beautiful stuff—I feel your love and presence in every piece.  I am so grateful.

Mom loved to read, and way back when she taught high school English, I remember she liked to teach Native American writings, and I know she would like this Navajo prayer:

In beauty may I walk

All day long may I walk

Through the returning seasons may I walk

Beautifully will I possess again

Beautifully birds,

Beautifully joyful birds

On the trail marked with pollen may I walk

With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk

With dew about my feet may I walk

With beauty may I walk

With beauty before me may I walk

With beauty behind me may I walk

With beauty above me may I walk

With beauty all around me may I walk

In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk

In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk

It is finished in beauty.

It is finished in beauty.

Her passing was beautiful and peaceful, and it was a profound blessing to be with her and all of you who were present physically or spiritually with your love and support.

She also loved Kahlil Gibran, and for years had his poems on her bedside.  He wrote, “For what is it to die, but to stand in the sun and melt into the wind?  And when the earth has claimed our limbs, then we shall truly dance.”

I know Mom is walking in beauty now, and dancing in the stars. 

One of her favorite songs was “I Wonder as I Wander,” and she used to sing it around home and in church in her strong, clear, beautiful soprano voice:  “I wonder as I wander out under the stars.” 

She is no longer wandering, but I imagine she will be always wondering, and her presence and my memories of her will always fill me with wonder. 

I think of her every time I hear Coldplay sing, 'Cause you’re a sky, you’re a sky full of stars/Such a heavenly view/You’re such a heavenly view.'  

Thanks, Mom, for showing us the way."

Watermelon

Today I went to the Del Mar farmer’s market and bought a watermelon from Ray’s Subtropical stand.  Ray didn’t know if it would be red or yellow, but he said it would be sweet and it was ripe and ready to eat now.  That was enough for me.  I took it home, and cut it open.  It was yellow.  I prefer red—the color of watermelon in my youth--but it doesn’t matter.  What matters is the texture—crisp and crunchy—and the flavor—sweet with depth, complexity, and fragrance.  It did pretty well on these counts, just not quite as deep and rich as a red can be, and a little more mellow. 

Every time I eat a watermelon, I think of Janie Jones and one spectacularly hot, humid summer Saturday in the country in Mississippi.  Janie Jones was the grandmother of my church when I was growing up.  When we first moved to Zachary, Louisiana, when I was 3, she was already the one who ran things at the church, where my dad was going to now be pastor.  She did the flowers in front of the pulpit every Sunday, and the music minister, Wayne Vincent, lived at her house, where we would go over for dinner at least every week, often on Sundays after service.  She seemed to be the one who did everything at the church, and she knew everyone, and she was old!  She wore old lady dresses and hats to church and had arms with the big wattles and lots of wrinkles in her face, and her eyes shone and twinkled and she smiled all the time, and I loved her.  She was kind and cheery.  I thought Santa Claus would be like her if he were a woman and around all the time. 

I associate her with the color brown—brown hair, brown dresses, brown hats—and brown pecans, delicious lasagna, National geographic magazines, and archery.  She lived in a big old white frame house facing the railroad tracks.  Her house had a big front porch with a deep grassy front yard and a big backyard filled with pecan trees.  We’d go over for dinner after Sunday morning services, and while we waited for the meal to be served, we’d sit in the dark, curtained parlor, with its big soft brown chairs, and browse through stacks and stacks of National Geographic magazines, piled all around the room—the first time I ever saw the magazine or had any exposure to the larger world was there in her small dark cozy parlor.  Then she’d call us in to sit around the big dining table, and serve us lasagna—my first time ever to eat lasagna or even hear the word was at her house, and it was a delicious revelation of cheesy goodness. 

After we’d stuffed ourselves silly, we could run out to play in the yard—hide-and-seek, or even chase or cowboys and Indians, if we could move—and eventually we were given buckets and told to pick pecans.  This was my favorite chore of all time.  The ground was so rich and dark and deep smelling—dark dirt and old leaves—and we could pick for hours and hours and never run out of pecans to find somewhere if we poked around and explored enough. 

On truly special days, Wayne Vincent would set up the archery set in the front yard, and let us shoot his bow and arrow at the target.  I couldn’t think of anything finer that to have my own bow and arrow and be able to practice anytime I wanted.

Plus, Janie Jones had a grandson about my age who would come to visit every now and then.  His name was Ben Jones. He had sandy hair and a nice face, and he was my first true love.  I remember one Wednesday night in particular after church—we were maybe 8 years old.  We were sitting in the dirt outside the church offices waiting for our respective adults and rolling the roly poly bugs around in the dirt, shooting them like marbles, when some bossy older girl came by and told us we shouldn’t hurt the bugs.  I felt so ashamed that we stopped and instead drew in the dirt and watched fireflies and talked about our plans for the future, and pledged our eternal love to each other and decided we would get married.  I was so excited.  I couldn’t wait to tell my mom when I got home, but she just laughed and laughed and said we couldn’t get married now, and I cried and cried and couldn’t understand why.  It seemed so perfect.  But she said we were too young and Ben didn’t live here and was going home soon.

Then one day Wayne Vincent announced he was leaving the church to go to another church in Baton Rouge, and not long after that Janie Jones retired her post as director of everything at the church, sold her house and moved to Mississippi to be with her family.

I was shocked.  I didn’t see how First Baptist Zachary could go on without her, and I couldn’t imagine my own life without her.  My father assured me we would go visit her and see her again.

And we did--once.  One hot, sunny summer day, he piled us all into the car and said we were going to go see Janie Jones.  I was beside myself with joy and excitement.  I hoped Ben would be there too.  We drove for hours and hours and wound up at a farmhouse way out in the country, where he said Mrs. Jones lived with her family.  She came out to greet us and gave me a warm, squeeze-the-life-out-of-you hug, and I wanted to bask in her presence all day, but there were lots of people I didn’t know there, and they all wanted to see my dad and her too.  Ben wasn’t there.    I asked, but they said he couldn’t come, that he lived far away, or something--I was too disappointed to follow what they said. 

We ate a light lunch of finger sandwiches—no lasagna—and the old folks talked awhile and it seemed like the energy just kind of died down.  Then someone said we should go pick some watermelon.  They piled us all in the back of a pick-up truck and away we went out in the fields, bumping along on roads, no roads, out in pasture, and stopped somewhere in the bright sun.  The men picked lots and lots of watermelons, cutting them off the vine, and piling them in the back of the truck, and we drove back to the house.  I’d never seen so many watermelons, and I couldn’t imagine how they expected us to eat them all.

My dad said it was getting late, and we better be going, but I begged and pleaded for some watermelon first.  He seemed to not want to take it, and I couldn’t understand why.  I didn’t learn until much later that they grew those watermelon to sell, and he was concerned about taking away part of their livelihood.  He eventually conceded to a little watermelon, and we ate it—red, hot, sweet, and delicious--and then said our goodbyes. 

I never saw Janie Jones, or Ben Jones again, but I remember her every time I eat watermelon (or, for that matter, have any experience that includes a warm and loving smile, pecans, lasagna, National Geographics, archery sets, roly poly bugs, old lady arms, or the color brown).  Even if the watermelon is yellow.  I am happy to support my local farmer.

Evening at the Beach

Sunset over Del Mar Beach, and immediately after from another perspective.

The earth is beautiful.  May we cherish and protect her.

Becoming Beach

Two views of one shell in the process of becoming sand, from this morning's walk

Morning at the Beach: Different Perspectives

Stillness in motion

Wave upon Wave

Morning at the Beach: Seaweed

The ocean was gently exuberant this morning: curling, white water waves pouring to shore, brown ibis poking around the sand, brown pelicans swooping along the line of the waves, little shore birds skittering about, fat knots of seaweed dotting the beach, and the sky oh so blue with white fluffy clouds and a few dark ones, and still the marine layer hanging on in a few places.  And this beauty:

Water receding around giant sea bulb, rigid, heavy, delicate, strange beauty

Morning Beach Walk--The Regulars

           

This morning on Del Mar Beach, I saw 5 brown mallard ducks, 1 dead seagull, 1 live seagull, a twisted rope of kelp and seaweed at least 20 feet long, with a root structure at least 18 inches in diameter.  The sky was crystal blue.  The water smooth as silk, with rolling waves, was dotted with surfers. 

I walked past old couples, young couples, singles: a middle-aged man in an LSU t-shirt, stretched over his solid belly, with a baseball cap on backwards; two athletic-looking middle-aged women, super tan, one in a tennis skirt, the other in running shorts, talking the whole way; a man yakking on his cell phone as he walked quickly on the beach, his woman at his side and keeping stride; and a young couple with their twin white-blond, toddler daughters in their pink bathing suits—the father in his board shorts, no shirt, tattoo between the shoulder blades, longish brown hair pulled back under another backwards baseball cap, and the mother a bleached blond in cut-off jean shorts and a bikini top with a tattoo on her calf, and their 2 mini-pinschers staked to the beach and watching their every move as they played with the girls in the shallow water.

I had seen the couple yesterday morning, walking on the cliff above the beach, with the girls strapped to their chests like shields, arms and legs dangling (in complete over-extension—parents, please stop doing this to your children!), the girls’ faces expressionless as the father complained about something someone had done wrong to him, and the mother followed him, “uh-huhing” along the way.  When I passed the mother and the second girl, she looked at me with a piercing, cut-right-through-me gaze that I would have expected to see on a 100-year-old, not the slightest bit of little girl in her face.  Today, when I passed them on the beach, they gave no sense of recognizing me, and both little girls again looked blank-faced and expressionless, even as they played in the water and toddled in the surf on their chubby little legs.  They looked so cute in their little pink suits, and so little girl-like in the way they played, but nothing showed on their faces.  Their mother smiled at them and talked with delight to the father about the way they moved in the water, but the girls didn’t laugh or smile—they were very serious about what they were doing.

As I came up the cliff from the beach, many surfers passed me.  A middle-aged woman carrying a huge paddleboard like it was nothing.  An older guy with his wet suit pulled down to the waist following right behind her with a surfboard.  And 3 young guys with wet suits down to their narrow waists, well-muscled, tanned chests, scampering down with their surfboards, as easy as could be.

Up on the cliffs on the path to and from the beach, I passed a man who I’d seen surfing many times—a short, solid, athletic guy who looks like he’s in his 60s, silver hair, well-built, never smiles, serious, good surfer, reminds me of Terence Stamp—this time with his wife and dog, and they looked perfect for him:  the dog one of those solid, little brown dogs, about the size of a pug, but without the pug face—an open kind of cute but pugnacious face and with pointed ears.  His wife was well-put-together and looked prosperous and intelligent. 

I saw a few other regulars too: the older, slouched guy in khakis and a dark green polo shirt walking his 2 dachshunds—he always wears the same clothes and always smiles, but doesn’t speak, and the young, super-buff, well-muscled Asian guy, who I only seem to ever see as he is crouching down to pick up poop from the black lab he walks.  

When I left for my walk, the sky was overcast--the marine layer--then the sun cut through it all, bright, bright, bright, and the waves just keep coming, like the people.  We're all regulars here.

Sightings on the Edge of the World, #1

I was sitting in the left hand turn lane at 8:30 at night, right next to my building, almost home, just waiting to turn the corner, listening to the blinker, when the woman with the tomahawk caught my eye.  White, middle-aged, short blond hair, plumpish, dressed in ¾-length navy slacks and a red cardigan.  She looked like she could be going to the church social, but here she was crossing the coast highway in the evening.  Hardly anyone walks here on the coast road even in broad daylight, and no one walks at night.  Least of all women carrying tomahawks.

I was so tired and everything is so disorienting to me here, I almost let it go by, but then I thought, “Was that really a tomahawk?”  I looked again more closely.  It was definitely a bone handle, like an antler, and there were definitely feathers sticking out from the end of it.  Maybe it was more of a ceremonial feather-duster, cut-through-the-thickness of ridiculousness, shamanic wand kind of thing.  But it was definitely an antler with feathers.  She was dressed like she could be carrying a pie across the street to the neighbor. 

Maybe she was going home too, returning from the ceremony.  Her walk was brisk and purposeful.

The moon shone.  The pine trees stood dark against the sky.  The air was cool.  The ocean glowed at the end of the block.

The light turned green, and I drove home in wonder.

In the Name of Love: For Martin Luther King, Jr.

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!

I remember when they integrated the schools in Zachary, Louisiana.  I was in the 7^th grade.  We were scared.  Scared it would bring us down, tarnish us, that some of the black would rub off, taint us permanently--ashamed to admit  those feelings, and proud of our willingness to go to an integrated school-- a big brer rabbit-tar baby ball of confused, conflicted thoughts and feelings.  At least, that’s how it was for me.  I can’t really speak to anyone else’s feelings, because we never talked about it. 

Some of my friends who I’d been in school with up to that point went instead to the white-only private schools that suddenly sprung up like mushrooms.  The rest of us were moved from what had been the white junior high-high school, with the big white columns on the main street in town, oak trees hung with moss in the front, to the former black junior high-high school on a back road along the outskirts in the poor part of town, lined with big ditches, back behind the railroad tracks, with trees that looked like overgrown weeds. 

To have to go to the black school, with the black principal, in the black part of town—oh, the indignity, the shame.  The first few weeks of school some white boys from the 8^th grade trashed the place, but that just hurt and shocked people, increasing the shame and bad feelings, and after that everyone behaved.  We were 50-50 black and white students and teachers, or as close as the school board could arrange it, and teachers arranged the classrooms so that the seating was equally integrated too.

My favorite class was Chorus.  Miss Gloria taught us, and she was young and beautiful and enthusiastic.  I was part of a sextet, 3 black girls and 3 white girls, and we felt so cool and proud of ourselves.  We liked to link arms and walk around, proclaiming we were a "sextet"!  Emphasis on the word “sex.” 

The highlight was when we got to go to LSU to perform at the State Choral Contest.  Denise Kent, a white girl, whose single mother was cool, invited us all over to her house to practice.  Imagine, 3 black girls and 3 white girls in the same house, singing—at night, in Zachary, La.  I think we were going to have a slumber party, but some mothers thought better of it—didn’t want to push it too much.  It was the first time I had ever seen such a thing or heard of anyone doing anything like that: simply being in each other’s houses as friends and fellow humans.  The daring of it took my breath away.  I felt absolutely on the edge of the known universe. 

Once we got to Baton Rouge, we stepped outside of the known world altogether.  LSU was a hippy haven in those days, with head shops, bars, and dives all along the edge of campus.  Pictures of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison stared out at us from windows draped with beaded curtains.  Incense filled the streets.  We knew we were free.  We linked arms, integrating ourselves--black, white, black, white, black, white--and strutted our stuff in our matching uniforms—short burgundy skirts and vests with white blouses.  Walking out in public, together, black and white, singing our songs.

Nothing was ever the same after that.

Thank you, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and all the people who made such moments and many more for many people possible.  Thank you, Miss Gloria, Mrs. Kent, and all the members of the sextet, wherever you are, whoever you are now.  In the Name of Love.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! May your year be shiny and new!

(From Del Mar Beach on New Year's morning)

Love, Eberly