Last night I watched a DVD about George VI and his wife Elizabeth. Something about their daughter -- that she is a contemporary of my mom's -- that she has the same name? -- made me cry a bit.
My mom would have been 87 today. She was a small town woman from Rumford, RI who was raised and went to college in the same state. In college at the University of Rhode Island -- then Rhode Island State College, I think -- she met a G.I. from a very different small town in Alabama. They married and ultimately divorced, after having three children (by true coincidence during the same years that the current Elizabeth II had hers, only opposite genders). But Mom would want me to get away from Elizabeth the Queen; Britain was my thing, not hers.
Mom wanted to be a stay-at-home housewife and mother, but circumstances obligated her to pursue her initial career path, teaching, while raising her mixed brood, especially me, since I was not quite five when my parents divorced. My sister, Dianne (nicknamed Dede, for "diaper drencher", by Mom's father), was sixteen and my brother Steve, was fourteen and a half. Steve might have been called "Jeff", but for his birth in Alabama, which gave folks pause at his being called "Jeff Davis".
My advent was in Rhode Island. I might have been "Caroline", save for the fact that it was 1960 and my Republican mother and father (ultimately, they both changed their party affiliations: Watergate did it for Mom) did not want people to think that I'd been named for Caroline Kennedy. I wasn't named for Prince Andrew of Britain, either, just spelled Carolyn -- without a middle name, as was Dede. Steve has the family name, Whitaker. There were no boys in my mother's generation, so like her cousin Joyce Whitaker Sparling, she incorporated her maiden name into her son's.
Mom's favorite things were, more or less in order, peace, common sense, Newman Congregational Church, her children, financial stability, intellectual and emotional fulfillment,her father, Abraham Lincoln, old movies, Perry Mason, fresh raspberries, and ice cream. I think that she would want me to say that Rebecca was her favorite movie.
These topics will be plenty to discuss in the coming days.
More to come ....
Showing posts with label Betty Whitaker Davis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Betty Whitaker Davis. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Ministering (For Ginny)
Three Senior Ministers have made their individual marks on Newman during my lifetime.
Then new to his call, The Reverend Bob Symington baptized me. As I remember, his was a conservative ministry, geared principally to the adult members of Newman Church prior to Newman’s becoming part of the wider ministry of the U.C.C. He was a part of the background of my childhood; my memories of him center primarily on the hospital and post-op visits he made to me in the 1960s. My memories of my childhood and early teenage years at Newman focus on the personalities of my Sunday School teachers. I have particularly warm memories of the generosity of Dave Drummond’s intellect and spirit – qualities that I recalled when I became a Church School teacher in the 1980s. Life in the 1960s and the early 1970s was the richer for the influence of many ecclesiastical teachers.
Reverend Shire influenced my initially joining Newman. He came several times to see me at home. We would have tea and discuss a fifteen-year-old’s versions of sociology and theology. What was his concept of Hell? Did he believe in a personal God? How does a person sustain his/her faith during a lifetime, especially during times of trouble? He was, as ever, articulate in his interpretations; I was earnest, if not brilliant, in my questing, and our talks tended to be lengthy.
Later, one of his associates, the first female minister of my acquaintance, influenced my interpretations of independence and self-direction. Shortly before my oral exam for the Foreign Service, she sent me a The Far Side cartoon entitled, “Midway through the exam, [Herbert] pulls out a bigger brain.”
My mother, Betty Whitaker Davis, was a path-setter in her quiet but determined way – at Newman first as a devoted church member, then as a Deacon, then a Trustee. Mom began to attend Newman as a teen in the 1930s (Her father was a Methodist, her mother Episcopalian, and some of her friends were Congregationalists). Mom was Clerk of the U.C.C. Rhode Island Conference in the mid-1990s. She and many others had been impressed in a variety of ways by the last associate minister to work with David Shire, and Mom informed me when I was on a visit home from Boston that she and the Reverend Daehler Hayes had interviewed his older brother for the RI Conference. Her impressions of the young pastor were summed up in one phrase, “What a man!”
How true.
Then new to his call, The Reverend Bob Symington baptized me. As I remember, his was a conservative ministry, geared principally to the adult members of Newman Church prior to Newman’s becoming part of the wider ministry of the U.C.C. He was a part of the background of my childhood; my memories of him center primarily on the hospital and post-op visits he made to me in the 1960s. My memories of my childhood and early teenage years at Newman focus on the personalities of my Sunday School teachers. I have particularly warm memories of the generosity of Dave Drummond’s intellect and spirit – qualities that I recalled when I became a Church School teacher in the 1980s. Life in the 1960s and the early 1970s was the richer for the influence of many ecclesiastical teachers.
Reverend Shire influenced my initially joining Newman. He came several times to see me at home. We would have tea and discuss a fifteen-year-old’s versions of sociology and theology. What was his concept of Hell? Did he believe in a personal God? How does a person sustain his/her faith during a lifetime, especially during times of trouble? He was, as ever, articulate in his interpretations; I was earnest, if not brilliant, in my questing, and our talks tended to be lengthy.
Later, one of his associates, the first female minister of my acquaintance, influenced my interpretations of independence and self-direction. Shortly before my oral exam for the Foreign Service, she sent me a The Far Side cartoon entitled, “Midway through the exam, [Herbert] pulls out a bigger brain.”
My mother, Betty Whitaker Davis, was a path-setter in her quiet but determined way – at Newman first as a devoted church member, then as a Deacon, then a Trustee. Mom began to attend Newman as a teen in the 1930s (Her father was a Methodist, her mother Episcopalian, and some of her friends were Congregationalists). Mom was Clerk of the U.C.C. Rhode Island Conference in the mid-1990s. She and many others had been impressed in a variety of ways by the last associate minister to work with David Shire, and Mom informed me when I was on a visit home from Boston that she and the Reverend Daehler Hayes had interviewed his older brother for the RI Conference. Her impressions of the young pastor were summed up in one phrase, “What a man!”
How true.
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