Her Subject Was English
Kathryn Ausland Bailey
By J. Martin Bailey
I want to begin by thanking you for coming today. It means a great deal to our family that you have come to help us celebrate the life of a great lady. It is special for us to be in this place today, where we have shared a lot of joy and a lot of sorrow. Many of life’s important moments have been celebrated in this room.
Two of mother’s grandparents were buried from here, as were her father and her mother. Nearly 40 years ago our father was buried from here—as well as a great many close friends. So it is natural that we come. And we are grateful that you have come here too.
I have tried to think what I could say about mother that would be uniquely appropriate here in the church she loved—a church where so much community has been expressed, where so many promises have been made, where so much has been learned about the meaning of life.
Mother was a teacher. I suppose she taught Sunday School, but I don’t remember her for that. She taught English—and many remember her for that. I took English from her myself. I think the only thing that was worse than having my mother grade my English themes (as we called them then) was having my dad as my high school football coach.
I remember that mother helped me see that the most important part of speech is the verb. She drilled me on sentences until I understood why memorable sentences require powerful active verbs. It was only later that I could see that this was more than an exercise in writing. It was mother’s philosophy of life. I remember her best for the verb in her life—things she did, rather than the things she said.
Without ever talking about it, she helped me understand what, theologically, we mean by the Incarnation: the word that became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus is the supreme example, of course, of one whose words are given meaning by his actions and by the actions of his disciples. It is a paradox that language is best translated not by other words but by demonstrations.
Mother was a traveller. And there was another paradox demonstrated by mother’s life. She saw the world. She loved to travel. She could have lived anywhere. But she often said, “Emmetsburg is my home.”
Some of my favorite stories of mother involved her travel. She was drawn to the mountains. She and Tom hiked in Rocky Mountain National Park, especially enjoying the high lakes. She went to Norway with Gladys Scobell and Onika Prall, fascinated by the fijords and the mountains that rise from the sea. Perhaps she was searching for her roots in the land of her father’s birth.
Once, in 1968, when my family was traveling in Norway and she was on another trip with Gladys, she interrupted her play-going and sightseeing in London to fly to Oslo to spend a day with us. The travel agent couldn’t understand why she would go so far for such a short time. “I love my family,” she saie.
But even before she was free to travel so much, the mountains were a metaphor for peace and serenity. Occasionally when life was simply too busy, and she needed time and space she would announce to the family, “I’m going to the mountains.” And she took a book and a pitcher of iced tea—and her ashtray—to the back porch and retreated. She went to the mountains of her mind, and we stayed out of her way. I like to think of her now, among snow capped peaks.
Travel probably meant many things to mother. When she and Gladys and Kay Spies traveled, I am sure there was escape from the loneliness that came after our dad died. And especially after she retired from teaching, when her full life of classes seemed empty. But she was also a seeker. Travel broadened a person.
She had a worldview, a global perspective, an inner sense that we live in many cultures that all contribute to a rich human tradition. She was a liberal, in the best sense of that word. I’m not sure that she would have claimed that designation—but she gave that word meaning for me.
Now the paradox is this. There is no community that she loved more than Emmetsburg, but she sensed—and found gentle ways to insist—that there should be no borders that circumscribe one’s sense of community. The church and the wider Christian community symbolized that for her. She was an ecumenical person before that term was popularized and she was pleased when others caught on to what she already knew—that Congregationalists and Methodists and Lutherans and Roman Catholics live together and should worship and work together.
Mother loved drama. I could talk forever, but I must stop. Yet I want to mention one other interest that seemed to drive her spirit: dramatics. She acted in and directed plays. She could see how good plays communicate what life is all about. Once she and members of the Friday Club needed a child in a play reading of Thornton Wilder’s “Happy Journey from Trenton to Camden.” They picked me to ride with them in an imaginary car along congested and bumpy roads in the basement of the library. I had never heard of Trenton or Camden—cities in the state where we live.
That was my first experience of acting without any props. The story, as I recall, dealt with a family experiencing grief. They made a journey just to be together. They talked in that car about each other—and ultimately about the meaning of life. Mother knew that Shakespeare was right: the play is the thing that holds a mirror to reality. Perhaps in that glass we see dimly the reality of life. But mother seemed to sense that in drama we also encounter one another face to face.
What I have tried to say today is that our mother, sister, sister-in-law, grandmother, great grandmother, friend, was a faithful teacher whose subject was English but whose major was life.
October 9, 1991