by Craig Ruff
October 16, 2008

Mom’s nervous. She asks me if she should move into a smaller, cheaper apartment and cancel her costly Saginaw News subscription. A 91-year-old should not have to ask her son these questions.

To a farm family in Millington, Mom was born in 1916. She was too young to have any memories of World War I or the influenza epidemic, but caught all the forthcoming barbarism and turmoil of the vilest and most demeaning century in all human history. She was luckier than most.

You grew food on the farm, so you ate. Her mother, dad and the 13 kids worked for themselves — nobody could lay them off. Two sons survived wars. All the kids graduated high school. The girls and guys married decent people. A long-lived family, Mom and three sisters (all in their 90s) are hanging in there and doing pretty well, thanks for asking.

There but for fortune, Mom could have been born in 1916 to Russian peasants, German Jews, or Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, or Japanese burghers. Her parents and siblings could have been slaughtered in wars and camps, forced to flee home, and had confiscated from them everything that they owned. They could have had no say in how they were governed and lived in persistent terror.

Mom doesn’t look back…and she does. She knows that certainties of unending financial adequacy (the 1920s) rest on folly, but doesn’t dwell on it. She knows the pathos of the Great Depression: she married a guy who left school in the 8th grade because he felt like he was being a drain on his family, hopped freight trains, and sent pennies of hard-scrabbled savings back home to support his mother and two sisters.

She knows a second World War of such horror that few veterans would share with others—even their spouses — what they saw. She knows scarcity of housing. She sent a kid to elementary school necessarily and frighteningly housing a fallout shelter. Could she get to the school and have a last hug before nuclear bombs hit Saginaw? She feared greatly that the kid would get drafted and sent to and killed in Vietnam.

She saw her husband off in the mornings of the late 1970s, knowing that he would park in a gas station line for three hours for a fill-up. In hyper-inflationary times and only at the expense of other necessities, she paid for bread that she and her mother once made from scratch from grain grown on the farm.

Don’t you dare think that Mom drowns in self-pity. She absolutely embraces the beauty of that which is now, be it weather, the granddaughter’s success, the son being healthier than he should be, the daughter-in-law’s sense of purpose, and her own stamina. It takes great prying by a son to get her to relive anything in the past. Mom speaks of the past only under duress.

Memories and experiences wage life-long wars against the pulse of the present and flushness of the future. For some, memories prevail and for some of them, only the bad sticks. For others, cherishing the moment and future moments win out.

At times, like one of my recent conversations with Mom, I am humiliated by how self-absorbed anyone can be. Dorothy Parker and a snobbish date dropped by a party. Some stranger struggled to be witty. Parker’s date mumbled that he could not enjoy the merriment: “I don’t suffer fools.” Parker replied: “That’s queer. Your mother could.”

Emma Ruff doesn’t deserve 2008’s economic train wreck. A person living through 91 years of intermittent hells does not deserve it — that view from a foolish kid. Mom knows that living coughs up the hellish and the sublime. Mom knows the difference. She’s lived through the differences.

Mom may or may not have to move or give up a newspaper subscription. Her kid’s heart breaks. Rightly, she’s nervous, but she’s wily and resilient. Experiencing what she has, she will do what it takes. She won’t look back.

What does a 91 year-old know? Everything.

Craig Ruff is, among many things, a senior policy fellow and former president of Lansing-based Public Sector Consultants.