Still An Angel

It was the late 1950s. More than a decade after the end of the Second World War western economies were booming and so was the global birth rate. There was exponential growth in technology. The Soviet Union had become a looming nuclear threat and began the space race with their launch of Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth. A young unknown singer, named Elvis Presley, hit the pop music charts with “heartbreak hotel”. Detroit’s automobile factories were churning out ever larger and more garish fleets that were fun, flashy, and flamboyantly finned. One in three high-school graduates was heading off to college.

Among those were Carl and Gerda Haynie. They had met and married while he was in the military. They began their family right away with the birth of a son followed by a daughter just fifteen months later. Twelve short months after that they had twins. He had left the military to go back to college but with four children in diapers they were finding it hard to make ends meet. Carl was forced to quit school and go to work. He found a job working with his brother Evan for a copper mine that was going into operation in southern Peru.

Carl flew down first to get established and Gerda followed later with the four children. The mine site is in the desolate mountains northeast of the city of Tacna. The mining company built a town named Toquepala near the site for the miners and their families. Nothing grows in those mountains. I’m absolutely serious…NOTHING grows. In deserts from Arizona to Death Valley you find plants and animals suited to the harsh environments, but here there is just rock and dirt as far as the eye can see without ANY living thing—it’s like being on the moon. It was into this desolation that my mother rode all those years ago. She had left all that was familiar and flew with faith to a far-flung field to try to make a better life with her husband and growing family.

A few years ago, soon after our mother died my dad, my siblings, and our spouses made the trip along the road up into Toquepala. As we drove up that dry brown dusty road I suddenly had the feeling that my mother had joined us on our pilgrimage back to our beginnings. It made me consider that over 50 years ago she made that same journey with four tiny children. She must have been wondering "what have I gotten myself into?", but she bloomed where she was planted and made a wonderful home. I’ve also thought many times about the next choice she made—to have a baby! The hospital the mining company was building was not yet complete—all they had was a small chicken-coop-shaped clinic. She already had her hands full with more children than the 3.67 average of the time. She could have stopped right then and settled in to raise the ones she had, but instead she chose me. I was a big baby (9 lbs. 10 oz.) and the labor was harder than any she ever experienced, but she and I somehow survived and she brought me home on Christmas Day 1958. She never held it against me, that I hurt her so badly. Instead she filled my childhood with fun and music and joy. I always felt secure in her love—even when she discovered me being bad.

My mother was articulate, intelligent, and a remarkable leader (she served multiple times as President of the Relief Society, and she finished her career as head of the Utah County Public Health Department). She was wise and firm. She was kind and compassionate. She had many talents and interests. She could have been anything she wanted, but what she wanted most, what she felt was more important than any of those other possibilities was me! She gave up the rest of her options for me and, one must presume ;->, the rest of my siblings. She gave us all the best of herself. She gave her money, herself, and her time and all who knew her were enriched. I continue to meet people who, when they find out who my mother was, tell me stories of her kindness to them and of their admiration for her. In her final years with the descent into ever more debilitating dementia she lost her memories and ultimately much of her motor skills and bodily functions, but she never lost her warm kindness, her winning smile, or her love of music. There were many times toward the end that she didn’t recognize me but when I played my guitar and/or sang she could sing along at the beginning of the disease, later she’d tap her leg to the rhythm, and even at the very end she’d get calm and listen peacefully. Many of our children never really knew her when she was lucid. I look forward to that great reunion where they’ll see her as she is…glorious and remarkable. Like Abraham Lincoln I had an angel mother and her legacy will continue in the lives of her posterity long after they know who to thank. Our choices and attitudes are not our own—we owe them to the rising generation.
Let’s make them matter!