Snapshot of a Bygone Day

In sorting through my mother’s things I found, not entirely to my surprise, that my mother hadn’t thrown away even a scrap of paper that might have had any consequence from the time she was married to the time she died. Not only were there school papers from my siblings many of them more than a half century old but I’ve also got every cancelled check and federal income tax form she produced during that period. My wife and I are now sorting through them in preparation for destroying them.

Sorting through the checks is quite a trip down Memory Lane for me. There are checks written to stores that no longer exist—Peck & Peck, Junior Bazaar, Saks Fifth Avenue, Scruggs, Vandervoorts, and Barney, Stix, Baer, and Fuller—or that have been absorbed into mega-conglomerates. We got our groceries from a little grocery store operated by people we actually knew and recognized and we had an account there, paying our account on a monthly basis.

I learned something of which I hadn’t been aware: my dad advertised in the Post-Dispatch.

Many of the checks in the household account were written to household help. That’s something my mom hadn’t grown up with but I suspect that my dad couldn’t imagine my mom not having household help. There were names I hadn’t thought of in a half century or more. I. V. Thompson. Virgie Wilson. Thelma White.

I remember being crazy about I. V. when I was a kid. She was very, very nice. Virgie might not have been much on cleaning house but she was unmatched in making pies (she’d worked for my dad’s Aunt Virginia who had been a terrific cook). She specialized in cream pies, things of that sort. Lemon meringue. Banana cream. Coconut cream. Custard pie. I still love all of them but on those rare occasions when I have them they never quite seem to match up to Virgie’s pies in my memory.

Thelma used to bring her daughter with her and we called her “little Thelma”. I remember my mom telling me that she’s a lawyer now.