Mulberry Jam

Several of my yoga students have asked about the music I play during class. I know many teachers disapprove of music during practice, but I feel it helps create a unique mental space for the practice and also creates an aural buffer for those of us living in noisy urban environments!

I’ve set up a couple of music mixes that I play on my iPod during class, and have posted three of them on the iTunes website. Here’s the first one I thought might interest my readers:

Last week my grandmother died. My mother’s mother was 96, and the matriarch of a large extended family centered in Delaware. She was an important presence in the lives of her children and grandchildren right up until the end, and we will all miss her very much. At the funeral on Friday my mother delivered the eulogy, and it was just right. We all felt she captured Grandma’s spirit and the reasons we will miss her. I wanted to include an excerpt from the address here:

Our mother left an indelible mark on all of our lives. We find ourselves, to this day, quoting her maxims. One of her favorites was, “Don’t make a song and dance of it.” This was said when we were crying and making a fuss over something. We were permitted to cry, but then she expected us to get on with things.

Mama and Daddy had a very good marriage and set a good example for all of us. Their arguments were few. We always hated it when they were mad at each other and not speaking. We were just not use to family dissension. I remember that once I told Mama to make up with Daddy because I was so bothered by their silence. She told me, “No, I am not going to this time. I always have to say ‘I’m sorry’ first.” I never knew if she said it first or not, but they never stayed mad for long.

As children we loved to see her dress up and wear perfume. Daddy liked her to wear perfume and she did so often. We kids thought she was beautiful when she was dressed up. She always cared about her appearance an freshened up every day before Daddy came in for supper. When she was working around the house she always wore fresh, stiffly starched aprons of print or flowered material over her house dresses. She never wore slacks until long after we had all left home. She loved shoes, and always had many different styles and colors.

I think she was as fair as she could be in the disciplining and treatment of the four of us. She always demanded total obedience, and there was to be no sassing or questioning her decisions. I sometimes felt that she was too hard on us because we never got to tell her our point of view. On one of my visits to the nursing home last year, we were having a good visit and reminiscing about old times. I told her that I thought she had been a good mother. She smiled and said, “Well, I sometimes think maybe I was too hard on you.” That really made me laugh. That was the very first time she ever admitted that.

She had a wonderful sense of humor, and sometimes at the dinner table we would all get silly and laughing. She and Daddy were always in the midst of it. Sometimes when we got carried away she would tell us we were going to have to go and sit on the cellar steps until we calmed down. I never remember any of us doing that, even once. She very seldom got mad at us, and then it was usually on rainy days when we could not go outside to play. I only saw her cry a very few times, when her four small children would finally wear her down.

Mama was always there for us, no matter where we were. When Doris was working in France, she mailed a homemade angel food cake and a separate container of icing for her birthday. When the postal clerk said, “Ma’am, it would be cheaper to send her the money and let her buy a cake,” Mama replied, “But it wouldn’t be the same.” She was a very caring and affectionate person, and her “never minds” were comforting when I had been hurt. As she got older, whenever we called her on the phone and when we were leaving after a visit to see her, she never failed to tell us that she loved us.

We all consider ourselves very lucky that we had a caring, loving mother up into our sixties. Not many people are that lucky. We always knew that she prayed for us every day and that was very comforting to us. We will all miss that.