Des Moines

(This is an amendment to my grandparents’ biographies, and my earlier, abbreviated writings about my experience with Mama and Papa)

[Re]union

My dad’s parents were Pearl C. Peery-Coller and Ceylon “Cye” Cecil Coller.  We called them Mama and Papa (“mam-aw” and “pap-aw”). I don’t really remember anything about them from ages 0-5, partially because I was ages 0-5, and partially because they lived in Pennsylvania.  I was aware they existed, but I don’t know that I could have picked them out of a crowd.

But late one night when I was 5, my parents told me to rush to the [phone] extension in the living room.  With the whole family on different phones throughout the house, Mama and Papa announced they were moving to Des Moines, a town I had heard of, but didn’t really have any relationship to.  It was about to become one of the most important cities in my life.

The adult conversation continued on, in an even more boring fashion, discussing people and cities I hadn’t heard of, so I fell asleep on the phone, imagining what it was going to be like having grandparents living even closer than Nanny and Pa.

Just 45 minutes away from our town of Boone, Mama and Papa’s Des Moines was an easy place to drop us kids off when my parents needed an over-night baby sitter, or when my dad had errands to run in the big city.  Sometimes the North Grand Mall in the nearby city of Ames didn’t have what he needed, so we made the trek to Merle Hay Mall in Des Moines.

It would be a couple decades before I realized Mama and Papa hadn’t just moved to Iowa, but they had moved back to Iowa after just a 7-year stint in Pennsylvania.  They moved back for the same reason – the only acceptable reason – that any Coller ever moved anywhere: they were called by God.  But I prefer to believe the more romantic version, that “God’s calling” was just the conscious excuse to do what their subconscious was drawing them toward: their grandbabies; and that their 17-year prior relationship with Iowa just made it comfortable enough to feel the Spirit leading.  Either way, the Collers were [re]united.

Particular

In front of the kids, Papa only ever called Mama, “Mom”.  She was a no-nonsense matriarch with an unshakable confidence in her traditional gender roles, whereas Papa was a no-non-nonsense guy – a perfectly proper pastor behind the pulpit, but a got-your-nose, candy-sneaking grandpa when his house slippers were on and his La-Z-Boy was engaged.

They were both meticulously kempt in every manner of life.  I never saw a crumb nor a piece of lint in the interior of any of Papa’s cars, and I dared not find out how the universe might break if I ever changed that.

Nor did I ever see the exterior of his car in need of a wash or wax, save for the road trip from Iowa to New York, when he didn’t have a chance to wash it between locations and we teased him mercilessly – and for good reason – we had never had the chance before, nor would we ever have it again.

His lawn was always short and sharp.  And even though I don’t recall ever seeing him mow his own lawn, he had all the requisite tools, cleaned, sharpened, and hanging neatly in his garage, so I assumed the grass just kept itself trimmed out of respect for their landlord, and the threat of his surgical preparedness.

Likewise, I don’t recall Mama vacuuming, but the spot-free carpet always had the fresh lines that told me it probably awoke each morning for a pre-dawn self-cleaning, ready to salute Mama as she put on her first pot of coffee, just after sunrise.

Balanced Ingredients

In contrast to my Wysong grandparents in Ohio, Mama and Papa seemed to value consistency over extravagance, and security over adventure. They seemed a perfect yang, to the Wysong yin.  Maybe it was just a function of seeing them so much more frequently, and not being able to consistently maintain a party-all-the-time atmosphere.  But their measured demeanor also seemed to stem from a genuine concern for reducing chaos and building character.  Where my Ohio grandparents would say, “We can’t wait for you to come out so we can spoil you!”, Mama and Papa would occasionally deny a ridiculously exorbitant request of mine by uttering the jarring phrase, “We wouldn’t want to spoil you!”

But spoiled or not, they filled my soul with unconditional love.  Right up through the very last time I saw Papa, he showered me with unearned affections and genuine affirmations, like,

“I love you so much, and I’m so proud of you and your beautiful family and all that you’re working so hard at!”

The truth was, especially in my adult years, they had no idea what choices I was making – some of them, not even I was proud of.  In the same way, they couldn’t have known how I was interacting with my family nor how hard I was working.  But I never doubted for a minute that they meant every word of it with their whole hearts.  They didn’t even know when I wasn’t living up to their accolades, and I could tell they actively didn’t mind.  I was being me, and that was good enough for them.

Days With Mama

I want to say that Mama was an exquisite cook.  I remember the rest of my family saying that, and I remember that all of our dinners were homemade and perfectly palatable. But the only meals I actually remember as a kid are the lunches she made of mac ‘n cheese and half of a turkey sandwich.  In other words, I thought she was an exquisite cook.

These lunches seemed to always interrupt our daytime TV watching of the original Dennis the Menace and Lassie.  She would turn the station to a show I would grow to love, even though it was directed at an audience much older than I was: Perry Mason.  That’s how orderly Mama was: she finished preparing the same great lunch at exactly the same time as the opening credits to her favorite program, day in and day out.

After lunch was finished, and the dishes had been cleared, and the towel (which had protected the self-cleaning carpet from the kids’ stray macaroni’s) had been rolled up – a ritual which always took exactly the 30 minutes of a single Perry Mason – we were free to get back to our kid programming of Andy Griffith and Leave It To Beaver.

The Champ

“That’s enough TV for now,” was neither a request nor a demand when Mama said it.  It was just a fact.  And not even a sad one, since it usually meant she was ready to play games with us.  Tri-ominos was our favorite, and Papa favored Chinese Checkers, but Mama had a nearly-inexhaustible appetite for Scrabble.

We often played multiple times a day, and legend had it that, even when we weren’t around, Mama and Papa played against each other every single night.  That seemed plausible, since even their vacation luggage would always include:

1. Clothes,
2. Toiletries,
3. Bibles, and
4. their Deluxe Scrabble board (and two Scrabble dictionaries)

We only ever played the “educational” way, where anyone could use the dictionaries at any point, with the goal of expanding vocabularies more than tricking your opponent.  By about age 8, I had memorized almost all the 2-letter words in the English language, as well as most words that used a ‘q’ without requiring a ‘u’.  Still, Mama was unbeatable.  I would be a teenager with a great deal of luck (and perhaps some cheating…I don’t think so, but I wouldn’t be surprised) before I outscored my grandparents.  It required using all my letters twice, and even then, the final score was pretty close.

 

After our mental exercise, Mama frequently recommended we find something to do with our bodies.  It didn’t take too long for us to realize that basketball wasn’t really an option, since their slanted driveway and street usually turned that sport into “chase-ball”.  And the yard was too small for baseball, but it was the perfect size for badminton.  Badminton is not a violent sport, so it takes dozens of hours of playing to legitimately wear out even a single birdie.  We wore our several, and Papa faithfully replaced each one, and even retrieved the occasional stray shuttlecock from the giant tree that shaded our games in the summer.

The last game we played, I sent one straight up, through the tree.  We waited for seconds…and then minutes…it never fell back down.  Papa searched the tree to no avail.  But according to him, I hit it so high, it probably still hasn’t fallen back to earth, to this day.

Nights With Papa

When Papa returned home, after replenishing our badminton equipment, it was often time for a trip to the candy store, which required walking a half a block to the Ashby Ave dead end, and then traversing the shortcut through “the woods” – a 200ft green belt that we always thought was home to bears and snakes.

 

 

I now suspect that the return trip was the real impetus for the candy store trips, because we never took the shortcut home.  Instead, we walked what felt like miles out of the way, through the neighborhood and apartments, and up impossibly high hills, where I swore each time that I would never make it.

“Please Papa – you have to carry me!  I can’t go another step!  I’m gonna diiiiiie!!!”

 

It was during times like this that we would beg Papa for more war stories.  He was in the Air Force during WWII, I would be middle-aged before his list of stories grew from one: the story of how he was running from the Indians, narrowly escaping death, but not before being shot in the chin with an arrow, explaining the large dimple that was a curiosity to us.

We always arrived home, exhausted and entertained.

Pre-Dinner Routines

If there was TV time before dinner, we would watch Papa’s version of Perry Mason, which was Matlock.  And perhaps some Wheel of Fortune.  I wasn’t about to become a huge fan of either, so I usually went about creating the most elaborate Rube Goldberg contraptions I could out of their two incongruent sets of dominoes, often constructing multi-level towers that – if everything went as planned – were completely leveled at the end.

 

Years later, I visited their home as an adult and noticed their coffee table was significantly more weathered than I had remembered.  I ran my hand across the top, remembering how difficult it was to incorporate the smaller set of dominoes that weren’t heavy enough to knock down the larger ones.

“How did the table get all the dents?” I asked, noticing hundreds of pock marks that dimpled the entire surface, causing it to stand out as the single piece of non-pristine furniture in their home.

“You did that!” Mama replied, surprised I had forgotten my dominoes creations.  “Remember, you used to make all those towers and then knock them down…?”

“I remember!” I protested, “but I didn’t know it dented the table!   Why didn’t you make me stop?”

That’s when Papa chimed in, “Aw – it’s fine.  We had fun watching you make new creations each night.  That was worth more than a silly coffee table.”

Dang.  I suddenly wondered if I had ever unknowingly dropped a crumb in his car.  As particular as they were about their possessions, I don’t remember ever getting in trouble for disturbing any of it.

…even that time I touched the thermostat without asking, turning it up just a little, to a number I thought sounded reasonable: 85.  I always liked the weather when it was 85 outside, so I figured that was about the right temperature for the inside too.  That was closest I came to their wrath.  Mama just choked down a chuckle and said, “Next time, if you need it warmer, let me know and I can help make it comfortable for you.”

Night Time

After Wheel of Fortune, we began our night time routine:

• Prayer before a homecooked dinner
• Bath and perhaps a little TV (we all liked Get Smart and Mister Ed.  Papa’s favorite was the goofballs in “Car 54 Where Are You?”)
• Book reading on Mama’s lap.

Mama had a magical trunk of children’s books in the basement.  We could each pick 2 or 3.  Ryan and I would mostly pick independently, but we agreed: one of us had to choose “What Happened to George?”, the story of a pig who ate one too many donuts and then exploded.

It was also in that basement, next to the magical trunk that Ryan and I found salvation – not from death and Hell, but worse: from mom’s disappointment.  Several Decembers earlier, we had been sword-fighting with our Carrom sticks, exactly how our mom had been telling us not to.  Ryan took a swipe, and I deftly avoided it at the last moment, leaving his follow-through to decapitate my mom’s porcelain angel family keepsake.  My mom looked at us like we had smashed the ten commandments.  An epic couple of time-outs were followed by guilt trips that littered our Christmas preparations like reindeer droppings from Santa’s sleigh.

But one night, while looking for bed time stories in Mama’s trunk, we found the exact same angel, reincarnated on Mama’s storage room shelf.  In a desperation only George Costanza could understand, we begged Mama to give it to our mother.  Of course, she obliged and restored our hope that Jesus still does Christmas miracles.

Sometime after dinner, Papa would retire to his room.  If he didn’t, our book reading would have to be halted because we could scarcely hear Mama reading in our ears, over the commotion of Papa’s thunderous snoring, a quirk he vehemently denied.  After years of back and forth, we finally hatched a plan to record him on a cassette tape (we had no video cameras, and even when we did get them, they were reserved for children’s recitals and family vacations – the two types of events you were sure to never care to watch again).

But it seemed each time we opened the squeaky closet door to take out the tape recorder, he would wake up, deny his racket, and retire to the bedroom.

 

When we were older, we slept in the basement, in Papa’s study / spare room.  His shower and closet were down there, as well as a pastorly collection of books and trinkets.  My one keepsake from his collection is a nautically-themed light that takes me back to that reverend office each time I see it.

When we were younger, we slept on the floor in Mama’s sewing room.  I don’t remember her doing any serious quilting, but she was adequately-versed in all the womanly skills, so any time the need arose, Mama could work her needle-and-thread magic to bring the world into order, and our costumes into reality.

 

Tradition

Christmases were often spent with my other grandparents in Ohio, but all the other holidays brought their own unique, predictable anticipation.

Thanksgiving was the biggest.  This is where Mama’s cooking really shone through.  The highlight of the day was her homemade cheesecake with strawberries and pumpkin pie with real whipped cream.  Papa always woke up early to watch the parade.  To this day, I still try to like it; to this day, I still just don’t get it.

The birthday of an adult meant that we would be going to the Chinese buffet The Mandarin, or possibly the Golden Dragon restaurant.  And kids birthdays were predictably celebrated at Chuck E. Cheese’s predecessor, Show-Biz Pizza, “Where a kid can be a kid!”

 

Last Days

The last time I saw Mama, she was in a care facility.  We had one child at the time, a daughter, who we gave the middle name Pearl, in honor of Mama.  Mama was too tired to complete a game of Scrabble, but it was lovely to see her again, hear her encouragements, and let her meet her great-granddaughter before she became a part of the qi; which, even if Mama didn’t believe in it, she would have appreciated that it was worth 33 if you could land it on a triple word score.

 

After Mama passed away in 2012, Papa moved to Sacramento to live with his son, my dad.  He continued to be an encouraging voice, and a respected leader of several Bible studies, even as his stamina slowly began to deteriorate in about 2019.

Papa passed away from complications related to pneumonia around 2am on Saturday, April 29th, 2023.  His memorial service was held in Des Moines, Iowa, 78 days later, on my 43rd birthday.  I was not invited, though I’m sure Papa would have wanted me to be.  He was a better man than his son.  So July 16 is a day set aside to commemorate those who are dead to the Collers; two screwed up men who share a brotherhood of doing their best and spreading unconditional love.  I’ll continue where he left off.  Thank you for the love and effort, Papa!

The slideshow they made about his Christian legacy is here:

(More about Mama and Papa’s lives, from a perspective other than mine, can be found here.)