This one’s for you, Mom

Wanda Lang was born on April 2, 1925 in a house on Maywood Avenue to Ben and Velma Lang. She was the oldest of six children. She never left Maywood.

Today she would have been 85.

Mom was a slight woman, never tipping the scales at more than a hundred pounds even in her flannel shirt. Her skin clung to her body like the skin on a stewing chicken. She never wore a hint of make-up even though it may have helped fill out the wrinkles. Her Toni home perm coiff suited her well, until near the end when I chopped off the frizz and spiked her thinning hair. She liked to reach up and feel it.

Still she’d come to terms with her life in a way that seemed would always be impossible for me. How this happened for a woman who owned only one dress style — blue cotton, straight formless skirt with at least one pocket and a drawstring waist, wore flat shoes and still dabbled in flannel, I’d never know.

Velma, her mom, gave Wanda her first Singer sewing machine when she was 12. I own it now. It isn’t fancy and only sews straight stitches. Kind of like Wanda. This tiny Featherweight would not be her last. She never lost her love of sewing. Swatches of fabric decorated her journals.

Even though there was probably not a more humble person than Wanda, she had a few skeletons in the closet. As a teenager, she’d catch bees and light fire with a match to their wings. She painted fingernail polish on the tips of her bobby pins to prevent her sisters from stealing them. Self-preservation, if you knew her three sisters.

Wanda was the shy, quiet one. As a teenager, she loved to speed skate. Her skates were black with long shiny blades. I can picture her leaning over whipping her arms to and fro to give her more speed on those skinny bird legs. My husband kidded her about jumping over barrels. She’d embarrassingly cover her mouth and giggle, her eyes squinting closed.

During WWII, the USO played silent melodramas. Wanda played the music accompaniment, with one finger on the piano. Her Hollywood-bound sister Glenna sang. They always had enough rations because Grandpa had connections. He was mayor of Maywood. He promoted war bonds standing aside Jimmy Doolittle and General Patton.

After the war, Wanda met Jim at a Halloween party, and they started dating.  “I thought your mom would eventually take off her mask,”  Dad would tease.  “She never did.” Mom would blush and he’d kiss the back of her neck.

Four weeks later, on Thanksgiving, Jim asked Wanda to marry him. She accepted. When her mom,Velma, handed him two squares of toilet paper at the dinner table, it occurred to him what a classy family he was marrying into.  They actually used napkins.  What more can you say about a guy who drove a Hudson that looked like a bathtub?

Wanda, of course, made her wedding dress. The dress was something blue and it turns out the something borrowed was a pink zipper she reused from another piece of clothing.

They got married the day after Christmas, all in 1946. She cried on her wedding day. There were bad omens, she said. First they couldn’t find the marriage license, and then one of her bridesmaids forgot to wear panties.

After the reception, Wanda was driven five miles away and dropped off in Bellflower, as part of an old (and we can all be thankful it’s now outdated) custom called chivalry. Wanda had managed to convince them to let her cousin come with her.  The pair started walking back to Maywood, and yes, it began to rain. A man in a truck pulled up alongside and offered them a ride. “Are you sure you want to marry into a family,” he asked, after hearing the story, “ that would do that to you?”

“But it was my family,” she confessed.

The 1100 square foot, one-bath home would be her home for the rest of her life. My dad would add the only swimming pool in town to the extensive back yard with the help of Bob-the-Builder-wannabe brother-in-laws. She would bring four children into this tiny, but loving home. Penny, Timmy, Kelly and Holly. Our names made us sound like we belonged to Peter Pan’s group of friends who would never grow up.

Maybe because Mom was so unpretentious, she kept her words short, except when she said words like linoleum. It was like being on a roll and she couldn’t stop. The word aluminum ran away with her. We teased her so much when she said, “Aluminum num num num,” that she called it tin foil.

Mom, though astute in matters of the heart, did not catch on quickly to worldly affairs. When the guacamole was passed her way, she held up her hand in stop sign fashion. “No, thanks. I don’t care for any Guadalajara.” She took Metamusil daily, but mistakenly (and more descriptively) called it, “Motomissile.” But Mom was always there with a Kleenex tissue for every tear and a graham cracker for any hunger. Everything she wore sported a pocket — even her hand-sewn bathing suit. She lined the pocket with a ZipLock bag.

She was the glue that kept our family together. Everyone liked Wanda. Okay, she did have one foe in the world — Dean. Her cousin who lived down the street bopped her on her head, and she hated it. But Mom never said mean things about him. Dean didn’t even know she considered him the enemy. Even the relatives that weren’t speaking to one another spoke to Wanda.

Wanda always thought of others. When neighbors had hard times, she was the first to quietly place bags of food on their porches. The day after one such anonymous dropping, the guy next door came over to thank her. Wanda asked how she knew it had been her. The neighbor said that she and my dad were the only people on the block who would do such a nice thing.

She taught me to return anything borrowed in better condition than I received it. She advised me not to emboss the year on the Mylar balloons I had imprinted to sell at the 1981 New Year’s Day Rose Parade, one of my brighter ideas to earn extra money, just in case I had a few left over. Good thing. It was one of the only years when it rained. I had 250 left, still in my garage.  She taught me that there is always something good in the worse of mankind.

Happy Birthday, Mom. Thanks for teaching me and keeping a sense of humor.