Sometime during the 1980s my mother was named “Humanitarian of the Year” by one of Benson’s civic clubs. The picture in the Benson Review shows her standing there while one of the club’s officers, holding a plaque, reads the citation. She stands there with a slightly amused smile, the same expression she had in every picture ever taken of her.

She looks like she probably knows something that somebody else doesn’t. And she was probably right.

I think that while she was listening to the guy reading the citation she was probably thinking that he was like a lot of preachers talking about the dead person at a funeral: they’re in the ballpark, but they haven’t touched any of the bases.

It’s very probable that the description of mother’s humanitarian efforts were a lot more high flown than the efforts themselves. She was more fundamental than foundational. It was this simple: see a need and fill it.

Mother was a teacher’s aide working with special needs children, and she also drove the school bus that took them to their school in Selma, about twenty miles away. These were children from poor families that lived in the country between Benson and Selma, and there were a lot of things they didn’t have, some of them essential.

Mother would see that one of her students needed something, say a pair of shoes. She would go to a local merchant and explain why that merchant should donate a pair of shoes. And the merchant did.

I’m sure that there were store owners in Benson who hated to see mother come into their store, but the dozen and a half kids who rode on her bus were the better for it. They were children — some of them well into their teens — who needed looking out for.

See a need. Fill it.

Mother drove that bus well after she passed the typical 65-year-old retirement age. She drove it when she had some difficulty getting up into it because of her arthritic hip. And she protected her passengers fiercely.

Somebody asked her one time if she wasn’t afraid to drive the special needs students. Some of them were much bigger than she, and their behavior was sometimes unpredictable. Wasn’t she afraid of being attacked and injured?

Obviously the person asking the question didn’t know mother. This was a woman who had — with our father — raised three sons and could, right up to the last week of her life, pin any of them to the wall with “the look.” I imagine all she had to do when one of her students got out of line was give that student the look, and he or she became very orderly.

I knew the look well. Mother and I grew up together. She was a child bride, and I came along three years later. Daddy went to the navy, and there we were. A mother, just turned twenty-one, and a toddler, and a three-room apartment. Mother didn’t have a lot to do but raise me, and she really wanted me to grow up to be a gentleman.

See a need and fill it.

She wore out more than one Emily Post book making sure that I knew how to behave, and her lessons weren’t lost on me, although they did have some unintended consequences.

Once, when I was about twelve, I went to Broadway, NC for Preacher Calcoat’s camp. Once a year, Preacher Calcoat turned his farm into a Bible camp for the local kids, and for some reason my parents thought it would be a good idea for me to go, the only camper who didn’t know all the other campers. On the first day, Preacher Calcoat called me to the front and introduced me as the son of a member of one of his former congregations. He also said that I was a perfect gentleman, and that I even bowed when I was introduced to someone. In a single sentence, the preacher ensured that Bible camp was hell for me all week.

Mother had an abbreviated education, and she decided that needed fixing. This was before all of the different adult education programs. She started reading, all sorts of books, and she continued until she could no longer hold a book, learning a  wide variety of things. She also passed a love of books and reading to her sons. Two of us graduated with English degrees. The third one majored in Art, probably because it wasn’t English.

Looking back, I can see that Mother had decided the kind of person she wanted to be, one that her childhood, background, and education had not necessarily equipped her for. It wasn’t a matter of putting on airs, but of having qualities that she considered valuable. It was a very early encounter with managing by objective, and it worked for her. It also worked for us.

She knew what kind of men she wanted her sons to be, and she did everything she could to help us be that. And when, during our childhoods and teenaged years we didn’t want to be the kind of men she envisioned, she just gave us the look. Or she applied hard objects to our rears. And we were all better people for it.

About two weeks after mother died, the three sons and our families gathered in Benson to deal with her belongings. She hadn’t left a will; there wasn’t enough there to worry about the legalities. She had simply made a list specifying who got what. It’s a sign of her influence that we simply took the list and divided everything according to it. We didn’t squabble over anything. We wouldn’t have dared.

There are people who, when they die, you miss. Perhaps you miss them terribly. And then there are people who die and leave gaping holes in your life that no one nor time can fill. Mother was one of those. It was months after she died that I quit reaching for the phone to call her. And now, after twenty years, I still think about her nearly every day.

Happy mother’s day, mother.