Alchemist

My Mom the Alchemist

by Charles Burke

Charles Burke

You may have grown up in a perfect family, where everyone got along beautifully. I did not. My family was relatively dysfunctional. Nevertheless, my early life has been enormously helpful to me as a collection of priceless learning experiences.

And this attitude of taking what life gives, the good and the less-than-good, and finding something useful in it - I learned most of this from my own mother.

In February 1991 my father died. That marked the end of my parents' almost 50-year marriage. Fifty years of conflict, fights and unremitting abuse. My father was not a kind man, although he was convinced he was, and often told us so. My mother, born in an age when a marriage vow was an unbreakable contract, "stood by her man" through thick and thin. And it was nearly all thin.

Dad's abuse mainly took the form of psychological cruelty and taunting, but he didn't mind the occasional slap, punch or kick. Crushing confidence was his specialty. Some abusive spouses are selective. They may treat a wife or husband like dirt, while reserving good treatment for their children. Not Dad. He was an equal opportunity abuser.

So that was the climate I grew up in. I moved out on my own at the age of 19. But I was utterly unprepared for adulthood, so thoroughly had my self-confidence been stunted. Even after I left home, Mom stayed. Hoping, hoping that someday, somehow Dad would change. He never did change, of course.

But he did die, eventually, of a heart attack at age 71. And Mom set about the process of healing 50 years of deliberate wounding.

Lucile, age 71

That's when I began to see the amazing process of Mom's instinctive alchemy. According to legends, alchemists knew the secret of taking ordinary "base" metal and turning it into gold, the noblest and most treasured of elements.

An alchemist, it was said, could take a worthless piece of lead and convert it, through his special touch, into something that all people treasured... into gold. I watched as Mom set about doing exactly what the alchemists were rumored to be capable of achieving.

She had always written poetry, unschooled and untutored in conventional techniques though she was. And she always had her own unique style.

Half-serious, half-tongue-in-cheek, she managed to trample all the customary boundaries and rules of poetry, and still communicate her insights in a voice that was part south Georgia cotton field, part mountaintop ashram.

And following Dad's death, that unique poetry began pouring from her in torrents -- six, eight, sometimes ten poems a day. Every day.

Although she often expressed her pain, even bitterness, in her letters and conversations, her poetry pulsed and glowed with warmth, humor and... well... wisdom.

Mom grew up in the depths of the depression, so she missed the opportunity to finish high school. It wasn't till she was thirty that she passed her equivalency exams and got a high school certificate.

But no one, after reading her poetry, could ever call her "uneducated."

It was my Mom who gave me my love for books, reading to me every day until I learned for myself the power contained in well chosen words.

And so I continue to watch with a bit of awe as Mom, now 79, still spins out her golden verse, transforming the base metal and bitter dregs of her 50-year marriage into words that inspire and illuminate... into thoughts of pure gold.

Now, that's true alchemy.

Note: Lucile continued spinning out her uniquely alchemical views and verse for another 7 years after this article was written, until the age of 86.

For more of Lucile's "Alchemical Verse" click here.