My Mom Died, So I Have Something to Say

Just a few weeks ago we celebrated my mother Mary Porter’s 95th birthday. The occasion wasn’t at a fancy restaurant or a big gathering of friends and family. My wife made an exquisite flourless chocolate cake; there were just the four of us (including a grandchild from Chicago) gathered around an oversized dining room table.

Mom blew out the single candle on the cake and we chatted about our families and the world around us. A few days later she confided in me that she was losing her taste for chocolate– I should have known time was short at that point.

The last few weeks were difficult, as her increasing disabilities led her to an Emergency Room, three different rooms at a hospital, and --finally– home for hospice care. She did not die alone; we who loved her were bedside as she gasped her last breaths. And I believe her life-long of giving comfort and faith to others will continue to reverberate for many years to come.

She was my mommie, the one who nurtured me through good and bad times. Every good trait about me comes from her (and my dad). My not-so-good traits come from my self-centeredness and instance for many years that the path most traveled was never an option. 

I blame my mom for a lot of stuff.

I blame my mom for going to the school library when I was nine and insisting that I be allowed to check out more grown up science fiction writers. It’s her fault that I have a palate that goes beyond mediocre. And it’s her fault that I finally grasped the importance of family after years of pretending to be the black sheep. 

Every bit of writing I’ve ever done happened with her in my brain. In the early years, what I had to say came out awkwardly. With time, I learned that she expected the truth, and my accommodations to what I thought she wanted to hear weren’t satisfying for either of us.

Mary Porter’s world was vast. Let me tell you a short version of her life story. 

After growing up in San Francisco, she moved to Ankara with her parents, as my grandad Eric was tasked with helping to establish that nation's road infrastructure after WWII.  This effort was an extension of American Cold War policy tailored to blend with the modernization/secular  school of thought in Turkish domestic politics.

It was in Ankara that she met my father, a sailor on assignment at the American embassy. They stayed in the Navy for another three decades– the family unit was considered part of a military career in those days.

Their career took them to the Pentagon, Hawaii (before it was a state), Spain, and Great Britain, as well as states from coast-to-coast. Life was measured two or three years at a time, as new assignments were made and settling into new homes began anew.

Along the way us kids joined the adventure; myself in Turkey, brother Jeff in Bethesda, and sister Laura in Madrid. We’ve all turned out to have vastly different life paths, and have scattered to the winds. 

The traumas of being uprooted in growing up affected us differently; by the time I got to Point Loma High in 1967, I went through six months of hazing taking the form of being suspected as a “nark”. This was, after all, during the days of Pot Loma High, when a pre-homeroom bust ended up on the front page of the Evening Tribune.

My siblings and I are fortunate that Mom’s passing brought us together again under one roof, and with a shared experience that will (hopefully) presage closer relations in the future.

Mary made and kept friends from each posting throughout her life. Her dinner soirees were always a hit, and her repertoire of recipes grew with each move and were influenced by new acquaintances. I consider myself lucky to have grown up in a household where dishes from Pakistan were served in the same week as my father’s childhood favorite baked beans. 

Oh, and the cocktails! Back in the days of two martini lunches and filtered cigarettes, her bar was always stocked and ready for friends and neighbors. The glassware was correct, and the garnishes were plentiful. She wasn’t that much of a drinker, but the culture back then required booze as a lubricant. Nearing the end of her years, a Sunday Manhattan was part of her routine.

Volunteering for Navy Relief (and other groups) was also part of her routine. Mom got to see societal problems in the military realm and understand the struggles of unprepared and alienated husbands and wives in a universe where dealing with bad externalities was an expected skill set. 

When dad retired in the mid-seventies, they opted to return to San Diego, buying a home near the Mission Trails regional park with a patio that provided glorious sunset vistas year-round. By then they were empty nesters, and they took to it with gusto. 

Mary, at the suggestion of former neighbor Nova Dornin, embarked on a modeling career. The demand for camera friendly older women was high, and she was featured in nationally run advertising, along with fashion shows in Los Angeles and San Diego.

The experiences of those days went beyond new careers. She and dad bought a mobile home and used San Diego as a base for expeditions including Alaska and Florida. They kept old friendships alive and made new ones, on top of creating a massive collection of photos documenting their experiences.

They took cruises, so many cruises. Each one came with tales enriching the lives of all who heard them.

Near the end of the 20th century, Mary took on a new challenge, researching our family trees. She and a childhood friend collaborated on a book about an ancestor and life in Northern California a century earlier. 

Her massive collection of documentation will live on through one of her grandchildren, which is a good thing, since every time I jumped in felt like descending into a bottomless family vortex. I now do know that I have an ancestor who had marriages and families in both California and Australia. 

Mom’s faith was something she earned the hard way. Her mother was a devoted Christian Scientist, whose antipathy to modern medicine was a constant source of friction in the family. Her fellow congregants even picketed my grandparent’s house in Arlington, Virginia when she was involuntarily hospitalized for (what was called in those days) a nervous breakdown.  

Mom attended church in my father’s faith in the early years, a Methodist allegiance borne of a hardscrabble farmer’s life in rural Vermont. An inspiring minister drew my parents toward the Presbyterian faith during their first stay in San Diego. 

In more recent years, Mary (and Dad until he died in 2020) was drawn toward the Episcopal Church at St. Dunstan’s. The congregation’s orientation toward activism as a form of evangelism drew her into work with San Diego’s unhoused population along with outreach programs aimed at awareness of the environmental challenges in the area.

My parents were good Eisenhower Republicans for most of their lives, with an openness toward all points of view and an awareness of social issues. They never were anchored to one place in the political spectrum, and extremist reaction to Barack Obama’s election drove them from the Republican party.  

To this day, Mom’s house still gets fundraising appeals from both parties. She wrote the local GOP multiple times asking to get off their lists, to no avail.

She was a huge fan of my writing, starting with my early days with the underground press in San Diego five decades back. (She’d been inclined toward a journalism career prior to her time in Turkey) She wasn’t always a fan of my street activism  –it conflicted too much with the then-military mindset– but was always willing to listen.

Now Mary Porter is gone. We lost a wonderful human being in our lives. The emptiness is a hole that can only be filled with reminders of how she nurtured us and our families.

I’ll be taking a few days off over the coming weeks, in part because of the vast responsibilities of sorting out possessions, but mainly because –as my wife describes it– of feeling like I’m walking through Jello.

I’ll still be around, and can promise an often-snarky voter guide for the upcoming March primary election. 

Thank you for reading. Sharing makes us all a bit more human, I think.

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Wednesday News Links

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Father of Progressive Education Movement By Thomas Ultican at Tultican.
(Francis Weyland Parker brought learning by experience rather than learning by rote to America)

• In 1899, to free Parker from the continual harassment by politicians and the school board, Anita McCormack Blaine endowed a private school for him and his faculty. The new Chicago Institute was planned, developed and classes started. It was soon proposed that the Chicago Institute join with the Department of Education to form the School of Education at the University of Chicago. This plan became official on July 1, 1901 with Colonel Parker as director for the School of Education and John Dewey remaining Head Professor in the Graduate School of Arts, Literature and Science. In March 1902, Parker died and John Dewey was appointed his successor in the School of Education.

• Anita McCormack Blaine also convinced Colonel Parker to establish the Francis W. Parker School, a private school, in Chicago’s Lincoln Park. This school, established in 1899, was to operate according to Parker’s education principles. A second Francis W. Parker School was founded in San Diego in 1912 with a city population of only 39,000.

• Both private schools are still operating and very successful today.

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The Nationalization of Boeing Begins by Matt Stoller at the BIG Newsletter

• Boeing leadership is under attack from every direction. And that’s not even taking into account a little noticed problem that could actually grind Boeing to a halt. That would be a strike, with the machinists who actually make the planes considering a labor action in September after their contract runs out. What are the labor issues? Aside from management destroying the company, workers haven’t had a raise in ten years, their pensions got stripped, their cost of living increases were at 1.5%, and their health care is significantly worse. There’s more, which I’ll go into below. But I’m told that most workers expect a strike to happen.

• What we are seeing is something unusual in American capitalism, where the credibility of an immensely powerful and politically connected firm has collapsed. To understand what a turn-around this dynamic really is, you need look no further than a joke from President Barack Obama when Boeing was riding high. In 2012, Obama spoke at a Boeing plant. “Given the number of planes that I’ve been selling around the world,” he quipped, “I expect a gold watch upon my retirement."

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Anti-Abortion Propaganda in Schools By Jessica Valenti

• One of the anti-abortion movement’s biggest problems is generational: Young people are the most pro-choice demographic in the country. According to Pew, 74% of adults under 30 believe abortion should be legal in most or all circumstances, and nearly 40% believe abortion should be legal in all circumstances. A 2023 poll from Harvard University’s Institute of Politics found that adults under 30 were twice as likely to describe themselves as ‘pro-choice’ than ‘pro-life.’

• The anti-abortion movement knows that their support is dying, literally. That’s why activists and lawmakers are ramping up their efforts to indoctrinate children as early as possible—not just in churches or through religious schools, but in public school classrooms.

• This week, Kentucky Republican Rep. Nancy Tate introduced a bill that would require public middle schools to teach “human growth and development” by showing students a video by Live Action, one of the most extremist anti-abortion organizations in the country. Yes, that Live Action—the group best-known, of all things, for producing deceptive videos.