Halcyon Days

It’s usually not a good idea for individuals to make guarantees, but I feel very safe with this one: This Mother’s Day column will be unlike any other you’ve ever read.

A mother’s love for her child is unending and without parallel, and that is the main reason each of us think our mom is really special. They all are and always will be.

But what if you discovered your mom was like something you had only read about in ancient mythologies, scriptures, folk legends or tales of the Old West?

With that, let me offer you a posthumous introduction to the one and only Ella Faye Britt.

The Rabbit Goddess: Anglo-Saxon mythology included a certain spring-associated female deity named Eostre, who was generally depicted with rabbits by her side (and, yes, this is the pagan origin for the name of our modern Easter).

I’m convinced my mother was a late 20th-century emanation of her, although it didn’t become apparent until about the last decade of her life. I can’t pinpoint exactly when all the rabbit figurines started taking over the duplex my parents had in the Cooper-Young section of Memphis, or exactly when the real rabbits – her “second set of children” – began showing up.

It wasn’t long, though, before a virtual “Bunny Republic” had sprung up within the confines of a white picket fence, with my mom as its energetic, happy ruler. If that sounds a little exaggerated, consider that she had a full-color Peter Cottontail flag hanging outside the main window, embassy-style.

The collection of rabbit items eventually grew to about 3,000 pieces, by an estimate from me and my two brothers, and included not just a lighted display case filled with rabbit figurines, but boxes more of those, coffee mugs, stuffed toys, magnets, pictures and oil paintings, and a handcrafted lamp presented to her as a surprise birthday gift by employees at the custom lighting studio where she worked as a cleaning lady.

She really did love her pet rabbits like children, not just providing food, water, and shelter, but spending time in the yard with them. Needless to say, she was a hit with kids and adults alike in the neighborhood, and more than once she was given a new rabbit when one eventually died.

I’m not sure I’ll ever face a tougher challenge in life than the years I spent trying to find a rabbit item for her birthday, Easter or Christmas that she didn’t already have. Amazingly, I succeeded every time.

I often liked to think she was giving me divine guidance in my shopping.

My Mom Was A Real Clown: No, seriously, my mom was a real clown.

For a few years, she donned the full makeup, wig, big red nose, silly overalls and big shoes and became “Bubbles” – a name she picked to match her signature prop, a handheld liquid bubble blower. “Bubbles” usually made an appearance during special promotions at the gourmet popcorn shop my mom managed for a time, or at birthday parties for children of friends, if requested.

And that wasn’t even the most unusual job she ever held.

After dropping out of school soon after the beginning of her ninth grade term, she took on a myriad of odd jobs to earn money, including a stint as a gravedigger.

I don’t mean backhoe operator, either. I mean old-fashioned gravedigger with a shovel.

If that’s not enough to give you the spinal shivers, try this: While a gravedigger assisting her father (who was the town cemetery’s chief caretaker), she helped exhume and relocate coffins when the town established a new cemetery.

I once asked her if doing that ever gave her the creeps at any point. She looked me straight in the eye and replied, “No, not in the least. Because you know what was in those coffins? Nothing but dust.”

That woman was far wiser than any ninth grade dropout.

But to go back to the clown for a moment, she had a wicked sense of humor that would leap out at the least expected times. My youngest brother discovered that for himself one year during a Christmas visit.

As I and his two children watched, our mother gave him a small rectangular wrapped gift, which he opened to find a stylish silver-plated office pen. He loves those, something she knew, and can’t wait to try out a new one, which she also knew.

Sure enough, he clicked the top and the rest of us in the room got the laugh of our lives when the poor man leapt about a half-foot off the ground from the voltage going through his thumb.

God’s Fountain of Benevolence…: I don’t think I’ll ever know another person – man or woman – who made so certain not to just give pious lip service to charity, sharing, and kindness.

Growing up, I remember a lot of months she opened our home to someone, whether friend or family member, who needed a place to stay for a while. Later on in her life, that generosity didn’t wane.

One day, she and a friend were inside the Cooper-Young duplex getting something together for lunch while holding a yard sale. Looking through the front window, her friend suddenly spotted a strange man rummaging through one of the tables, so she got my mom’s attention.

Apparently realizing he had been spotted, the man jumped the picket fence and started to run, but my mom poked her head outside the door and yelled for him to stop and answer a question. It turned out the man was homeless, and wasn’t trying to steal any of the sale items, but thought there might be a bit of food somewhere on the table.

She didn’t call the police or tell him to go away. She invited him into the house and had him sit while she made him a stack of tuna fish sandwiches. When he had finished eating, she gave him three dollars, which was enough to buy a night’s stay at one of the local shelters.

In summer 2003, the midtown section of Memphis was heavily damaged by a straight-line windstorm that knocked down trees, damaged homes and left people without power for days. By chance of being on a different circuit than the rest of the block, her duplex was one of the few in the neighborhood that still had electricity after the storm, so she made an open invitation to anyone in the dark to come in and cook their food.

A few days later, a utility crew finally made it to her block to repair lines, replace transformers and deal with the removal of a huge oak tree that had been uprooted. She fed the entire crew, some of whom were on a 24-hour shift.

It wasn’t quite the miracle of the loaves and fishes, but I have a feeling they were just as grateful.

Faith and a sense of doing the right thing was of the utmost importance to her, and despite her lack of formal education, she was so deceptively eloquent and convincing as to gain audience with congressmen and newspaper editors to get across her point.

One of the best stories about her was the day she unexpectedly found herself in an impromptu religious debate with a local Muslim man while visiting a friend. According to the friend, she held forth so completely and convincingly on her spiritual convictions that by the end of it, the man proclaimed her to be the most fascinating woman he had ever met.

…And His Terrible Sword of Vengeance: Then again, my mom – 5-8 and a stout build – could just as quickly introduce a person to the true meaning of the fear of God.

There are witnesses to at least two incidents where a man was being helped off the floor of a neighborhood bar after saying the wrong thing to my mom. And those are just the cases I’ve been told about.

People used to think I was joking about my mom walking alone to and from work in Memphis, sometimes leaving the house before sunrise. She told me there was one day when she realized a man was trying to sneak up behind her, but instead of panicking or quickening her pace, she whirled around and growled “You got a problem, MISTER?”

The guy quickly decided he did not want his ass carted to the local trauma center that day, and chose a different direction to start walking.

She would be the first to tell you she had a mean streak that would equal any gunslinger of 150 years ago. I listened to her talk with glee about, as a child, picking up snakes – and half the time not bothering to see what kind she was grabbing by the head – and mercilessly chasing her two older sisters, screaming bloody murder, through the neighborhood.

She also told me about a day at school when a boy thought it would be funny to make her cry by spitting chewing tobacco juice on her shoes. He did, and then stood frozen with horror when my mom jerked the bag of tobacco out of his pocket, dumped a huge chaw in her mouth and then nailed him right between the eyes with it.

At a professional wrestling show she attended as a teenager, she sent one of the wrestlers sprawling to the floor by purposely tripping him as he passed by – just because she didn’t like him.

On the final day of cleaning out the Cooper-Young duplex after her death, I found one of those collectable cigarette tins that had somehow been overlooked with my brothers and other people helping the week of the funeral.

What was inside the box? A switchblade, two pocket knives, two hand daggers, a bootstrap dagger, a six-inch unhandled Bowie blade and one functional stun gun.

I have no idea if the Memphis Police Department was looking for any of those.

Toast Life, Celebrate, Dance: In her final years, my mom and I did a lot of this together and with friends in her neighborhood.

She loved living among friends, conversing, joking, cooking with them and sharing a few drinks. More than anyone else I’ve ever known, my mom understood that you don’t have to have a lot of money to live a wealthy life.

At age 60, the woman was still throwing block parties that would make a grown man cry out of sheer admiration: chicken, catfish, soul food, chips, dips, her own special hush puppies, plenty of beer, margaritas that could have been sold as prescription narcotics, tiki torches and a boombox helping us rock the night away.

Of all the things I never imagined as a kid, dancing with my mom in the front yard at 3 a.m. to Booker T and the MGs is pretty much top of the list.

Other days, she and I just enjoyed sitting together on the front porch, drinking a beer or some wine, and just talking about whatever crossed our minds.

One February afternoon, I had just packed up to return home to Arkansas for the workweek ahead. My only assistant at the newspaper there had left for a better job in Florida, and I was unsure how long it would take to find another.

Before I drove off, I turned back to my mom, still sitting on the porch, and said, “I don’t know when I’ll see you again, but I just want you to know how much I love you and always will.”

It was the last time I saw her.

But like any true legend, not even death itself could completely end her story. The evening after a funeral no one there will ever forget, I was standing on the back porch with one of her best friends, both of us having a beer in commemoration of her.

She turned to me and said, “Terry, I have to tell you a true story that I’ve never told anyone else, because your mom and I were sure people would think we were crazy.”

And that’s when I found out my mom had been involved in an unreported UFO sighting.

The two of them, along with my mom’s duplex neighbor, were on the front porch one night talking when one of them suddenly noticed an eerie set of red lights in the sky to the west, seemingly rotating in a circular pattern. Being in a neighborhood that is beneath one of the flight patterns into Memphis International Airport, they knew it probably wasn’t an aircraft they were staring at.

No one said a word for several minutes. Finally, the friend whispered to my mom, “Faye, what do you think that is?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are we seeing a flying saucer?”

“Maybe.”

More total silence. Then, the friend told me, she and the duplex neighbor suddenly felt a sensation as if their blood had frozen solid in their veins.

But it wasn’t from some ray or force field that had come down from the object off in the western sky. It was because my mom, who had been sitting behind the other two, quietly arose to the top of the steps, and in a voice I’m sure could have been heard three blocks away, yelled “Beam me up, Scotty! I’m ready to go!”

Wherever you are in the cosmos, Mom, I hope you have a wonderful Mother’s Day.

Terry Britt has never seen a flying saucer, although some people seem to think he was dropped off by one. You can reach him at terrybritt@hotmail.com.

This column is lovingly dedicated to the memory of Ella Faye Britt (1941-2005).