Saturday, October 13, 2007
Beatrice Tinney Bellomy Memorial Service held today, Oct. 13, 10 a.m. , at Shady Grove Cemetery
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A Son Remembers His Mother
It is tempting, after the past seventeen years of watching my mother slowly taken by the death of a thousand cuts -- one stroke after another taking this, then that from her -- to dwell on the tragedy at the end of life. She lost sight, mobility, hearing, memory, all those things that we so easily take for granted. She bore this dying with patience, but that was less than her life, less than her character.
Two words to sum her up: omnivorous curiosity. She wanted to know about everything, to absorb every bit of knowledge that life had on offer. She was not a woman to take on at Trivial Pursuit. Nothing better sums her approach to life than that it was a great learning opportunity.
Perhaps that is what made her daring, too, for she was a daring woman. In an era when women did not pursue careers, when the chores of keeping a household going were more than enough to absorb all the energy of a woman, mother set out to Tyler during the Big War to start a career, not just to do her bit for the War, but to set off in a new direction, off into a world unexplored.
That was a long time ago to some folks. Most secretaries had still been men, before the Pearl Harbor suggested a different need for men. Women did not live, unmarried, away from home, particularly not in strange, big cities, like Tyler. Mother did, along with a trio of smart, pretty young women from Winnsboro. She would became a secretary. She would remain one from the time that secretaries transcribed dictation from wax cylinders until word processors and then computers made the job a rare executive privilege.
It seems so simple and obvious to us that young women go off now to pursue their own careers wherever that takes them. It was not so in the 1940s. What changed that was women like Bea Bellomy who went forth to do the work of the world. We remember that the men who went out from East Texas to fight at strange places like Salerno and Luzon, to win victory over the tyranny of Japan and the National Socialists were heroes. We might take this occasion, standing by the graves of a couple of that heroic generation to recall that the women, too, went bravely forth to face the unknown.
If this seems too large and grand a thing to make of the life of a country girl who went to the city, then I am my mother’s son in this, for she saw the big picture of things, imagined the world large, and was, in imagination, one who saw from a great height. She was a reader, ate books the way a hungry kid goes through provisions. The Carnegie Library here nurtured her as surely as the genial wit of Charlie Tinney or the farm kept by Anna Tinney. The books fed her imagination as well as her thirst for knowledge. That never changed.
When we go home, I will pack up her Talking Books cassette reader from the Texas State Library and send it off so that it can bless someone else blinded by life. That was left to the last because that reader was her last link to the books that she loved. It was her fittest memorial.
So, I will not remember my mother’s cooking; my dad was the better cook, even if he was prone to barbecue. I will not fondly recall my mother’s domestic skills at all; they were what was necessary and not a whit more. What I will recall is a proud, industrious, and skilled professional woman, dressed properly and simply, so simply that one could hardly imagine that in her mind whole worlds bloomed and came to life when she read, that behind her eyes was a curious and eager mind. That is a worthy memory, as she was a worthy woman. --Walter Bellomy, son of Beatrice & Kenneth
