the rose of texas

i was a lucky kid. i had parents i really liked, and save for a few instances when i was a typical crappy teenager, we got along well and i enjoyed being around them. better yet, they had a hilarious and great group of friends they spent a lot of time with. when they all got together i loved hanging around listening to them telling stories and jokes and laughing and drinking. it was incredibly entertaining, and they were warm, wonderful people who didn’t seem to mind a gawky teenager looking on.

jean was one of my moms many ‘best friends’. she was a real steel magnolia, before that term was invented. she and her husband hailed from some remote part of texas – i’m not sure how they ended up part of the circle – maybe because they were sweet and thoughtful and bigger than life. jean had a variety of bouffant hairstyles, never out of place, hairsprayed into architectural wonders. she was always impeccably dressed and her makeup was heavy and precise and no one, not even her closest girlfriends, ever saw her without. i remember one summer when our families went on a group camping trip (which even then, imagining jean in a campground, was unthinkable). my mother speculated for weeks on the possibility we would finally see jean without makeup. the first morning she crawled out of their tent fully made up and dressed to the teeth. no one was sure how she accomplished it, but clearly nothing was going to stand in the way of her sartorial goals. that was the trip we stopped at a favorite public swimming pool and ‘the guys’ decided to grab jean and throw her in the water. it was the only time i saw her lose her cool – she fought like a wild animal, and of course they never intended to actually throw her in – she would have crawled out of that pool and killed them all, and they knew it.

as time passes, i realize more and more just how much i learned about friendship from this group of people. they knew how to have fun, to support each other without question, and they stuck together through thick and thin with incredible loyalty. when everyone got older and people started getting sick or dying, you could count on jean being one of the first at the door to help, or cook, or offer a shoulder. after my mother died, she and her husband were one of my fathers strongest support systems. when he got ill, they literally carried him into the hospital. they were among a very select group at the cemetary when we buried my dad, and at the dinner after i will always remember jean, standing with one hand on her cocked hip, talking to me about his girlfriend-after-my-mom in ways i can only politely describe as ‘ripping her to shreds’. she was dead on, of course, and through all the scathingly blunt commentary, i could see how much she loved my father and how scary strong her protective instinct had been. i also saw how long she had held her opinion inside so not to hurt him. a few years later i sang at jeans granddaughters wedding. this was the sort of thing i could ordinarily do in my sleep. what i hadn’t planned on was looking at the first few rows of the congregation and seeing what was left of my parents gang of friends, staring up at me. i felt supported and admired, but mostly i felt a huge emptiness for who was missing. afterwards, i walked up to jean. she grabbed me and kissed me and her first words were “your momma and daddy loved you so much”. it was beautiful and touching and i was blindsided by her unexpected tenderness. all of my mothers friends had made it their duty to mother me in their own ways, and her way was to be sure i knew my parents were there that day, too.

when i got the news last week that jean had died, i wasn’t that surprised. she was well into her 80′s and had been seriously ill for almost a year. yet as the day wore on, i began to realize how many of my most precious childhood memories have her floating around in them. the weekly ritual of the bowling league, the county fair where the gang ran the concession booth. for several years she worked with my mother in a small office, and i can see them there, the air heavy with their perfume and cigarette smoke. the barbeques in the backyard with jeans amazing southern food. how she had a formal family portrait taken every year so their faces were always smiling down from our bookshelf. how losing her is one more empty chair, one more touchstone to an era now past. how losing her is losing one more direct tie to my parents. the stories i have – i could go on and on and on. and i have to smile, and sometimes laugh out loud when i think back on those times. i was a lucky kid.

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