Slightly Wrong, Always Write.
HaHaHappy.org
An artistic place for the delightfully deranged.
The Happy Saint
My mother Barbara Ann Storrs Bennett Ulrich,
passed away peacefully on February 12, 2022 at the age of 85.
And she
was the closest thing
to a Happy Saint
as I have ever seen.
She was pleasant and resourceful,
always rallying her friends and family for some cause or another,
and she knew how to say thank you in the best of ways.
She was the kind of person who
if you, say, went to a restaurant with her,
by the time you left you would know the names and life stories
of the hostess, the server, the chef, the owner, the busboy,
and the people sitting at nearby tables.
And she could be so understanding too,
like, if you made a mistake,
and she knew it was an accident,
then she could be incredibly forgiving.
If you did something wrong on purpose, however,
well, that might not go by without remark
or corrective steps taken.
For she was also vigilant.
I, myself, ran afoul of her a few times,
and I can still taste the soap
she washed my mouth out with.
And, as I was a bit of a handful as a youth,
--a foul-mouthed troublemaker, to be plain--
that displayed incredible restraint on her part.
And she wasn’t just nice to talk to and genuinely interested in other people,
she also loved introducing them to each other,
to give them a chance to meet
incredibly interesting people too.
She had friends from her childhood,
friends from her neighborhood,
from her town,
from her clubs and societies,
and also people she randomly met in line at the bank.
Seriously.
Many is the time she started sentences with
“I have to tell you about this interesting person I just met…”
and that meeting
typically occurred in the most random of places.
And those chance meetings,
and little acts of random kindness,
sometimes developed into lifelong connections.
She was on the Town Welcome Wagon committee when we were kids,
and she welcomed a family from Pakistan, the Khans,
who had just moved there.
They had to rent a small apartment while they went house hunting
and as they has no bedding, dishes or utensils yet
my mom called around to make sure she could
get enough of everything to supply them.
No one else on the Welcome Wagon
had bothered to so much as talk to the Khans,
but since my mother was so great with them,
and my dad liked them too, which was a bit more rare,
they became my second set of godparents.
My first set lived overseas
but, apparently, Mom felt I needed a local one too.
Oh, and the home my new godparents wound up buying
was a
nice, little, nine-bedroom mansion
with a garage bigger than my house!
They had a swimming pool, a dog kennel,
multiple TV rooms, visitors from all over the world,
six kids of various ages,
and a seemingly endless supply of ice cream.
They became our extended family and I could
invite anyone up there I wished.
Mom made friends so easily, I think,
because, as dad would say,
she was completely
without
guile.
She was exactly who she seemed to be,
friendly, inquisitive, genuinely interested,
and fiercely loyal.
Her friends appreciated her so much,
they invited the rest of us to their
clubs, societies, and special events--
often because Mom had been the one
who introduced most of them
to those
clubs, societies and special events
in the first place.
If she could get a ne’er-do-well
such as I had been
to canvass voters door to door
as a teenager,
then she could get anyone to do anything.
She never missed a chance to remember someone’s birthday,
anniversary or life event, with a card or a care package.
She insisted we never show up at someone’s house without a gift,
and that we send a thank you note afterwards.
Picture her getting a teenager to pick out a housewarming gift
and then handwriting a thank you card on multiple occasions
and you will see that the moniker of The Happy Saint
carries with it both a force of will
as well as a tranquility of spirit.
She always wanted to make sure everyone got along,
and she loved that everyone wasn’t the same,
as she often used to say to me when I was a kid,
“if everyone was the same then the world would be borrrr-rrring.”
She was the best of us,
she taught me how to be kind,
friendly,
and resourceful,
and of the importance of keeping my elbows off the table,
and I taught her
how to be silly.
For I wouldn’t consider a conversation complete
if I couldn’t make her laugh by the end of it.
And laugh she did.
by
Geoffrey Bennett Ulrich,
her youngest
Audio recording by author available online:
https://geoffreyme.podbean.com/e/inherently-happy-ep-233-the-happy-saint/