Chris Jepson: My mother's perfume, my father's dictionary

Oh, if they were alive, the questions I’d ask. I’m closing in on 70 years of age. In three years I’ll be in my eighth decade. As I tell anyone who listens, pretty soon the years will add up. I lunch every Thursday with a 94-year-old friend, who several decades ago hired me at Winter Park Memorial Hospital. Louis Hughes is a prince among men. We talk of politics (he’s a Republican in the “I Like Ike” mode) and culture. He’s a bit of a bon vivant, an avid reader, a former West Texan and as kind and beautiful a soul as I could ever hope for. We both lament the questions we didn’t ask our parents.

My parents died within months of each other (in 1995) and, as life would have it, my sister Susan a year later. I was “grateful” my sister died after my parents, as I imagine nothing more sorrowful in life than the premature death of a child. A day does not go by but that I think of them. I have paintings and photographs of all three. My mother’s 1954 self-portrait hangs in the stairway to the upstairs and nearly every time I pass it, I gratefully touch it and mentally give her a big “smoochie” for my life.

My father’s dictionary; I was recently sitting in my home “office” when I looked up and saw my father’s worn and tattered dictionary. It’s truly a majestic book, nearly 4,000 pages in length, a 1953, second edition Webster’s International Dictionary of the English Language. He inscribed the date he took possession of it as Feb. 27, 1954. It was the final arbiter of many a family debate over definitions and usage. It was the unequivocal Bible in our home. I seldom use it and then only for the nostalgic reason that “my father once-upon-a-time touched this.” My father was a man of words (lawyerly) and his dictionary remains a prompt for my remembering his life.

When he died, I brought back to Florida his dictionary and a box of his tools (chisels, screw drivers, his hammer). My father could build anything. He wasn’t a particularly fine finish man but if he needed a structure built, plumbed and electrified, he did it himself.

My mother’s perfume. In the back shelf of my closet is a half-full bottle of my mother’s White Shoulders Perfume. When I inhale its floral fragrance I am transported to a time when she lived behind me and we lunched once a week. We did great lunch.

Mother had four children and she made each of us feel unique. I know some siblings jealously imagine that one of them was the preferred child, more “special” than the rest. Not so with Marybelle. She loved each of us unequivocally and gave us all the can-do kick in our step. There is no bigger gift in life than that of the good mother.

My mother’s perfume, my father’s dictionary are lodestones in my life. And, oh, the questions I could ask my parents. Of our ancestors from Aarhus. What betrayal caused my grandfather to not speak to his daughter for 13 years. Of a failed marriage. Of why this and not that? Of regrets and sorrow. But of much joy, too.

When I die, I will be the last to ever know what a grand, tough dame was my mother’s mother, Edith Moore. And so it sadly goes. For all of us.