Molly Ivins January 9

AUSTIN, Texas — My mother died the other day. Margaret Milne Ivins was a gay and gracious lady, and also one of the kindest people I've ever known. In 84 years of living, she never mastered the more practical aspects of life — I believe the correct clinical term is "seriously ditzy" — but she was nobody's fool.

She was shrewd about people and fond of fun, and at her best she could charm the birds from the trees. She was also lazy, a horrible housekeeper, somewhat depressive and addicted to soap operas, but hey, nobody's perfect.

She believed in Education, Good Manners and Kindness to Everyone. Actually, I believe she thought Good Manners and Kindness to Everyone were the same thing; they probably are. Her Everyone included the most hilarious cast of characters. Among my mother's dear friends were the people behind the counter at the dry cleaner's, bank tellers, grocery store clerks and the guys at the gas station. My father used to claim that the house would look better if she would stop treating the maid like a sorority sister, but she never did.

As you can gather, she led a somewhat privileged life. Her father was well-to-do; she attended private schools, and after her graduation from Smith College (class of '34), she went on a yearlong tour of Europe with two chums. That was in the days when one traveled on ships with steamer trunks so one could dress for dinner.

But there are different kinds of deprivation. My mother's mother died in a flu epidemic in the days before penicillin, when Mom was 16. I don't think she ever recovered from that sense of abandonment. She tried to comfort her grieving father and to mother her two much-younger siblings, but it was too much for her. She later recalled that her "life was saved" by a caring teacher at the Roycemore School for Girls in Evanston, Ill., who noticed that Miss Milne kept falling asleep in class from exhaustion. The teacher confronted my grandfather about it, and Mom was sent to boarding school at Walnut Hill in Massachusetts.

She went on to Smith, where her mother had gone before her and I went in my turn. (I know — this is so WASP, I'm about to urp myself.) In the midst of the Depression, my grandfather couldn't afford a third year at Smith, so Mom spent junior year, she always said, as "a broad in Montana," where she lived with her cousins, pledged Kappa Kappa Gamma in Missoula — later my sister's sorority — and had far too much fun. She was one of the first women ever to graduate from Smith with a degree in psychology, then considered rather a suspect field.

The evidence of that degree in her later life came in the form of her shrewd and unsparing readings of character and human relationships, including her own. She also raised her children with an unusual degree of liberality for that era; she never spanked any of us and cared not a jot for the reservations of her Texas neighbors about this college-educated Yankee lady.

Perhaps this is egocentric of me, but I think that being a mother was the central role of my mom's life. She once told me — the only one of her children never to give her a grandchild — that to the extent (in John Donne's phrase) that each man is an island, the closest relationship one can ever have with another human being on this earth is mother/child.

Not that she regarded us as an unmitigated blessing.

Like all moms, she could be a royal pain in the rear. And although she was our greatest cheerleader, she certainly took seriously her motherly duty to keep any of us from getting a swelled head.

I once had a book on the best-seller list for six months and pointed this out to her, inviting maternal approval. She said, "Yes, but I see you've slipped to last on the list." Now, that's graduate-level mothering.

I once opened our family refrigerator to find a shoe and an alarm clock inside. No wonder she could never find anything. She, of course, always claimed that we made these stories up, but as my sibs will testify, she frequently mixed up our names and, when truly flustered, would address us by the dog's name.

My mother was one of those women who are just gooey about babies. She always insisted that they smell good. As any fool knows, they frequently don't, but in my mother's ideal world, no one would ever mention bodily functions. In her endless and futile effort to turn me into a lady, she once advised my 10-year-old self that the proper response to having a horse step on your foot is, "Oh, fudge!" My mother doted shamelessly on her grandchildren and lived just long enough to meet the first great-grand and pronounce him quite the most wonderful baby there ever was.

Mother was the most teasable person I ever knew, and my brother Andy could get her to laughing so hard at her own foibles that tears would run down her cheeks. When Sara and I joined in, she would denounce us as "dreadful children, perfectly dreadful children." As my cousin Johnny said, "How can you not love a woman who loves Goo-Goo Clusters?"

My mother not only read but also traveled a great deal in her later years, usually with Smith College or Smithsonian Institution groups, venturing to China, Japan, India, Mexico, Turkey. Her succinct analysis of the world's woes was: "Too many people — the trouble with the world is too many people." The most baby-loving woman I ever knew was a great supporter of birth control and abortion rights. She had a bumper sticker on her car that said, "Pro-family, pro-child and pro-choice."

Politically, she was a lifelong Republican. She used to specify "Taft Republican" until people forgot who Taft was; then, she claimed "liberal Republican" and refused to admit that it was an oxymoron. She loathed Richard Nixon on the unimpeachable grounds that he was "not a nice man."

Just a few months ago, her beloved Scots terrier died. She explained how much she missed him by saying: "He had such excellent political judgment. We would watch the news together, and I would say: 'Duffie, there's that horrid Mr. Gingrich again. Isn't he an awful person?' And Duffie would thump his tail on the floor in agreement. He was a terribly smart dog."

What, peculiar? My mom?

A friend of mine claims that my mother must have been the model for the Helen Hokinson cartoons in The New Yorker. OK, that was her type, but she was as shrewd as she was ditzy. It was like living with a combination of Sigmund Freud and Gracie Allen. Looking on the bright side, at least we'll never have to eat turnip fluff again.

When it came to the "memorials preferred" on the obit form, we put in her favorite causes, but if someone truly wanted to memorialize my mother, that person would eat a piece of fudge today, hug someone he or she loves and be blindingly pleasant to a total stranger.

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Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

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