Remembering Fern

50 Years of Moustache Clipping

Every time I clip my moustache I think of Fern. I have for 50 years. Again this morning, clip, clip, clipping as I performed that Poirot nicety of facial hair grooming, I thought of her.

Not that she and I were ever close – though with such an intimate point of remembrance, you might think we must have been. But no, never close. Fern was one among many aunts of my half-sister-in-law – half because my much older brother and I were sons of the same mother, different fathers. Brother and I never even lived in the same house. Still, Fern was family, I suppose, but only barely, by marriage, and she not even the favorite aunt, so far as I know. I probably saw her only 20 times altogether. So not close.

But Fern is always with me in memory at those moustache times because one Christmas – it must be more than fifty years ago now – she gave me, as a token gift, a little plastic comb in a little plastic box, with a sticker on top that boldly says “Moustache Care.” Who would have thought that such a little thing could secure one’s memory for decades?

She gave the gift because, well, it was Christmas, and everyone needed to be gifted at Christmas. That’s just the way you did things – the way she did things, anyway. And we were giving her a ride to a family Christmas gathering a hundred miles away, through winter-bleak West Texas landscape, brown and flat as far as one could see – or some years dusted with snow blown on winds sweeping down unblocked from arctic regions 3000 miles to the north. – I’ve written about those Christmas journeys elsewhere. So, of course, there must be gifts.

In my young years, Fern fascinated me long before she became a real person in my world – “long” being a year or two, since for a child of five or six, even a year or two seems long. Her name it was that first sparked fascination. What images it raised. I had something of a start, in fact, when finally she stood before me as a person, looking nothing like the garden plants her name implied to one so young.

Fern, unlike her many sisters, or my own aunts, or most others in the family, had gone into the BIG world, and came back to West Texas, which was all the world most of us had known, only to retire. In quite an exceptional life for most women of her time and place, Fern went to college! I have no recollection of what she studied (if I ever knew), but she graduated just in time for World War II to sweep her into the WAVES, and away from the Texas Panhandle – first to Corpus Christi, and then all the way to Washington, DC. If I ever knew the work she did there, I can’t recall it, but while away in that BIG world, she married Al, (a man of Italian heritage from New Jersey!), and she learned to cook chicken cacciatore – a dish for which she was legendary among her West Texas relatives – she prided herself on it – though I don’t remember any of us ever getting a taste.

By the time she returned to the real world of my life, her Al had “passed on,” and so both he and the chicken cacciatore he no doubt inspired, existed only in the misty land of faith for my childish mind, shrouded in mist-moistened fronds of ferns – which bore no resemblance to the Fern who rode with us through the long West Texas miles to family Christmases.

What else do I remember about Fern? She was a woman of style far surpassing that achieved by the West Texas women around her. Of course she would be after that life in the BIG world. She wore spike heels with pointed toes, so spiked and so pointed that she developed bunions and hammertoes, and, no doubt, suffered with every step she walked (later on, could hardly walk at all). But she smiled through the pain.

And she had a degree of vanity that extended all the way to face lifts – a thing almost unheard of then and there. At least she wasn’t shy about admitting them. I remember her last lift – she’d reached the age, she said, when the doctor told her it would be her last. And, after she’d been in seclusion for a while, healing from it, I remember my wicked father (he could be a devil, and a drunken one at times, but everyone seemed to delight in him), asking her when she planned to have it – knowing all along that she already had. Her look of shock in the instant is still vivid in my memory. And I remember her laugh when she realized that it was his wicked devilry at play. I do wonder, though, if she really found it funny.

And I remember the stories when she died, and relatives finally went into the room in her house which “no one can ever enter,” finding it stacked feet deep with old mail, never opened. And how the old mail included envelopes with dividend and retirement checks, uncashed but still valid, so had to be gone through piece by piece.

But what I remember most, every time I trim my mustache, is those long drives back and forth to those family gatherings, and the gossip which went on for hours – never malicious, but so delicious – between Fren and my mother, who’d known each other all their lives, and known all the others all their lives too. How delightful, the “can you believe she ever …”s and the “if he sobered up …”s. All the added pounds of the year counted one-by-one and assigned to specific hips with gusto; and the possible indiscretions alluded to in terms surely no child would understand. I learned more about the family secrets on those drives than at any other time – learned things the birth, death and census records have no codes or columns to record. It didn’t occur to me then that the gossip in the rooms we’d left behind must be just as lively and alluring.

The years passed, as they do, and I moved on to my own BIG world – perhaps inspired at least a little by Fern. Due to distance and deaths, the annual Christmas family gatherings stopped, for me at least. I lost touch with Fern, and even gossip of her. I can’t say that I even remember hearing when she died.

But every week as I snip, snip, snip I remember her and smile. I wonder if she knew she was securing her memory, at least through my lifetime, with her little gift. What a wise woman she was if so. My little moustache comb must have cost no more than fifty cents fifty years ago. A penny a year to secure your memory. Not a bad investment, I  think.