My Mother's Whistle

Twelve years ago my mother passed away.


At the time of her death my mother had a lot of possessions.  Like any American, anyway; she probably had too much.  During the weeks & months that came after, it came down to my sister & I to figure out what to do with all that stuff.  Actually, the bulk of that responsibility fell on my sister, due to her living closest to my mother's home.


It was not an easy job.


Besides all the emotional aspects, there was all this stuff!  You know the stuff I mean - not the stuff that is easy; the stuff mother had already mentioned to us:  "Now, you will take the ruby ring because it's your son's birthstone." or "This necklace is for your oldest daughter."  No, the stuff I mean is, well, just stuff.


Think of your own junk drawer - don't lie; I know you have one!  What is that stuff, anyway?  Do you know?  & if you don't know, will someone coming along after you know?


A sampling of MY junk drawer at this moment yields:  an empty Tic-Tac box, a letter opener, old sunglasses that no one wears, a broken pirate magnet, assorted business cards, coins, paperclips & clothes pins.  Just to list a few things.


Now look at the drawers in someone else's house & they ALL become junk drawers, because we do not know how to assign value to stuff that was not ours.  Or, strike that, we can assign value, just not the same value as it may have had for the original owner.


My mother.  How do we decide what to throw away?  Is something more valuable, more worthwhile, just because it belonged to my mother?  Is it disrespectful to throw away what we might consider to be junk, tho it was not junk to her?  Is it wrong to coldly assess her possessions for value in this way?


Well, no.  It has to be done.  But you find yourself holding onto some strange thing, like a doilie or something, that you found mashed in the back of a drawer, & suddenly you are overwhelmed, & you sit there with the thing in your hand & you are stuck.  It gets to be too much.


Long time back, 12 years.


So, I wonder to find one day, last year, something from my mother's junk drawer, here, in my jewelry box, on this island in the middle of the Caribbean.  Far away from my mother's home in Colorado, where I last saw this thing.  I found my mother's whistle.


It is a whistle like a coach would use.  A good quality whistle on one of those macrame lanyards.  One of those lanyards made out of those thin plastic strips that we all worked on in Girl Scout summer camp & never finished...Well, when my mother was a teenager she was a councillor at just such a camp.  She must have worn it around her neck, to whistle to her young Scouts.  To keep them in line.


My mother kept it all of her life.  Does that mean she placed a high value upon it?  Or did it just live in her junk drawer, unnoticed...


There my mother's whistle was, inexplicably in my hand.  But I must have had a feeling it was there in my jewelry box, because I was looking for a whistle at the time.  My older son was beginning to help train sailors in racing techniques & wanted a whistle to blow to start their races.


So, I took it off the macrame lanyard (so he would not lose the lanyard) & gave it to him.  "This is your grandmother's whistle." I said.  "Cool," he said.  & off he went.  I was happy to have found him a whistle, but didn't think much of it beyond that.


This past Saturday, I happened to be the Duty Parent at the yacht club while the sailors were sailing.  I got to ride in the coaches boat with my son, while he was coaching his sailors.  It was great, until the downpour began.  Sitting there, I was drenched to the bone, looking out at those poor wet sailors when I heard the whistle behind me.  "Three minutes!!" my son shouted.  


Then I noticed the whistle again.  My mother's whistle!  There it is!  Out of all the things she left us, out of all the furniture & jewelry, out of all the yard equipment & dishes, out of ALL that stuff, here, today, I know that ONE thing of my mother's is being put to good use.  A whistle.


As I thought about this, in the boat, with the rain pouring down, the whistle clenched in my son's teeth, I realized what the date was that day:  April 28th.  The twelfth anniversary of my mothers death.  & my son is on this day using a whistle that bridges him across the years to his grandmother as a teenager, who perhaps clenched this whistle in her teeth this same way, almost 60 years ago.  


My mother - whose main worry while she was dying was that her grandchildren would not remember her.


Maybe the whistle was the most valuable thing of all...