Vintage Ruby

My mother, Ruby Marie Tate Dryden See,
 who will be 100 years old tomorrow.

On a trip to Portugal two years ago, I visited a winery in the city of Porto, where the country’s renowned Port wines are blended, aged and bottled.

One enormous oak cask in the cellar holds wine that was made in 1847, the ultimate vintage for Port, a year in which sun, soil and moisture came together like it never has, before or since, to produce a fusion of extraordinary splendor. The guide explained that every year or so, the winemaker opens the spigot and tastes the wine. Astonishingly, it is continuing to improve with age.

So is my mother, Ruby, who was born April 3, 1913 – one-hundred years ago tomorrow – in the tiny town of Mineola, Mo.

Ruby's childhood memories are crystal clear. She remembers the fire that destroyed her family’s home when she was five and how she grieved about losing a doll Santa had brought her. She remembers the cyclone that lifted the Baptist Church from its foundation and blew it down the hill. She remembers her father coming up the road, waving a newspaper and yelling, “The war is over! The war is over!” (That’s World War I we’re talking about here.) She can recite poems – Evangeline, The Raven, Snowbound – she memorized in the one-room school she attended. My mother has a photographic memory.

The Tate sisters, Mineola, 1922.
 From left: Margaret, Lucille and Ruby.

Ruby attended Montgomery City High School, which she was representing in 1931 when she won the Missouri State High School Extemporaneous Speaking championship. She hasn't hesitated to speak her mind since.

She graduated from high school that year, the height of the Depression. There was no money for college. Hoping to land a political job, Ruby got herself elected secretary of the Montgomery County Democratic Party – she remains a staunch Democrat – but had to resign because she had no way to get back and forth to the county seat.

June 25, 1933: Ruby and Bud Dryden
on their wedding day.

She and my father, Bud, were married in 1933, and moved to Davis, Mo., a speck on the map at the junction of two gravel roads, where dad and his brother ran a general store.

In 1935 she gave birth to my brother, Jerry. In 1941, the family lost everything in a flood. My sister Judy was born the following year.

In 1944, the Drydens moved to Auxvasse, a town of 500, where dad purchased another general store. I arrived in 195l. Discovering she was pregnant came as a complete surprise. To this day my mother introduces me as her “change of life baby.”  

The Dryden family in 1963. From left: Tom, Judy, Jerry, Ruby and Bud.

Bud died of cancer in 1966. Ruby was 52. Though she grieved terribly, his death marked her rebirth as an independent, self-sufficient woman. The following year she took my sister and me halfway around the world, to Okinawa, where my Army officer brother and his family were living – hardly a typical trip for a small town housewife who had never traveled west of Kansas City.

At the time my father died, Ruby had no idea about her family's finances. She taught herself about the stock market, invested what Bud left her, multiplied it many times over, and lives on the proceeds today. When I was in college, mom had to have emergency gall bladder surgery. Her last words as she was wheeled away to the operating room weren’t, “I love you.” They were, “Call the broker and tell him I want 100 shares of Kroger.”

In 1976, when she was 63, Ruby sold her Auxvasse house and moved to the college town of Columbia where my sister and her young family lived.

In 1980, she took her grandson for a haircut and in the barber shop ran into Bill See, a retired physician with whom she had gone to high school. They married the next year, traveled the world and enjoyed each other’s company until his death in 1986 at which point, at 73, my mother found herself alone again.

Ruby and Dr. Bill See married in 1981.

And, once again, she didn’t waste time feeling sorry for herself. She adjusted her expectations and got on with life, taking pains to make sure she kept her mind razor-sharp so her children could have no doubt she had the ability to continue living on her own.

She read non-fiction constantly – two or three books a week; rarely watched TV, claiming that TV turns the mind to mush; played bridge, Scrabble, and became addicted to Sudoku puzzles.

In 1998, at 85, she underwent open-heart surgery. After rehabilitation, she decided she would cause her children less angst by moving to a retirement community. She listed her house and it quickly sold.

But the more she thought about it, the more depressing she found the prospect of living around old people, whom she had assiduously avoided for years, claiming they live in the past. She called the realtor to see if there was any way she could get out of selling the house.

The realtor reported the buyer, after agreeing to purchase her home, had found a house he liked better and would happily tear up the contract. Mom wept with relief.

Ruby bought her first Macintosh computer in 2000 and was so impressed with it she purchased Apple stock. Mom used her Mac to exchange emails with her far-flung family, track her finances and write her memoirs.

April, 2003: Ruby at her 90th birthday party.

Over the next 10 years, despite numerous episodes of congestive heart failure, chronically high blood pressure and several falls, including one from a step stool she had climbed at 92 to clean her kitchen shelves, mom continued to live alone.

Slowly but surely, she became unsteady on her feet. In 2008 she started using a walker to travel from her bedroom to her rocking chair in the kitchen which, most days, represented the extent of her exercise.

The older she became, the more fiercely she fought to maintain her independence, assuring us she was fine, while reminding us that she would rather be dead than move to an assisted living facility. She had her laundry room relocated from the basement, so she wouldn’t have to go up and down steps. She reconfigured her bathroom, removing the tub and replacing it with a shower stall she could walk into without risking a fall.

Her children and grandchildren were concerned but took Ruby at her word. We honestly believed she would die if forced to give up her house.

We insisted she wear a Lifeline pendant around her neck. If she needed to summon help in the middle of the night, she could press it and an ambulance would be on the way.

Summer, 2010: Ruby outside her home.

Mom was hospitalized with a particularly bad episode of congestive heart failure in the fall of 2010. Upon her release, she refused to go to a rehab facility and insisted on returning home. She said the physical therapists could visit her there just as easily as they could visit her at rehab, and that she would be more comfortable. She was 97.

My brother, sister and I finally put down our collective foot and demanded that mom hire a helper to come in every day to prepare breakfast, do laundry and run errands. Within a few months, mom had cut her back to three days a week, complaining about the expense but we knew it wasn’t the money that was bothering her. It was the fact that someone else was in her home.

My wife and I visited Ruby in October, 2011. Mom and I played several games of Scrabble. She opened one of them by forming a seven-letter word that earned her 50 bonus points – a difficult feat for a sharp 20-year-old, much less someone 98.

Our last night she cooked us a pot-roast dinner, complete with one of her famous butterscotch pies.

The next month -- the day she returned home from the hospital where she had been treated for high blood pressure -- Ruby was the victim of a home invader who beat, kicked, robbed and terrorized her and my sister, who walked in during the attack.

She spent the next two weeks in the skilled care section of a nursing home, where she received rehabilitative therapy to heal her broken ribs.

To our surprise, a few days before she was to be released, mom announced she wasn't going to return home. She would have done so in a heartbeat, but didn't want to worry her family any more than we were already worried. The nursing home had an available studio apartment in its Assisted Living wing. Ruby decided she would take it. On a temporary basis, of course. Maybe until spring, when everything would look better and she could return to her house. She would be able to take her meals in the dining room, there were nurses on call if she needed them, and her laundry would be done for her.

I flew to Missouri to move Ruby’s bedroom furniture and two chairs from her living room into her new residence. When I asked if she wanted me to bring any family photos, mom said no. I brought some anyway. She made me take all but one of them back. Family photographs were personal things you display in your home, and Assisted Living, she said, wasn’t her home.

“I hate being around all these old people,” she announced that first day as we made our way back to her apartment from the dining room. “I want to be around younger people.”

“All these people are younger than you,” I pointed out. She laughed. My mother has always been able to see the humor in any situation.

It took a few months but, to her family’s astonishment, Ruby liked Assisted Living. In ways, she said, she felt more independent than she had in her own home. She liked being able to take an elevator to the beauty shop. She liked the dining room, which, she declared, served up the kind of country cooking she had grown up eating. She liked being able to play bridge with her fellow residents, check out books from the library and attend movies in the theater. She liked that there was a post office in the lobby. “If I want to buy stamps or mail a letter,” she said, “I don’t even have to go outside.” She grew steadier on her feet, as she walked up and down the long hallways.

She had dreaded the loss of her privacy, but was pleased to learn that everyone left her alone. If she wanted to be around people, she could be. If not, nobody knocked on her door other than the nurses checking on her.

The Assisted Living facility didn’t have Internet service, so my nephews purchased a satellite uplink as a gift, enabling her to once again exchange emails with her family.

A new Assisted Living building was scheduled to open in the fall of 2012. Mom reserved a one-bedroom apartment and studied the floor plan, deciding where to place her furniture. “It’s going to be plush,” she said. “Like a nice hotel.”

In April, she decided to sell her house. “It doesn’t make sense to spend money to maintain it,” she said. “I’m not going back.” The house sold within a week.

June, 2012. Ruby and her children.

Last fall Ruby moved into her new apartment, where she has surrounded herself with her own possessions, including an oil painting of Mineola. Two months ago she testified at the trial of her assailant. She didn’t have to, but said she didn’t want any other victims to go through what she and my sister did.

Ruby's physical condition is precarious. She is hard of hearing, often short of breath and has high blood pressure. Sometimes when she picks up the phone, I can tell she isn’t feeling well. When I ask about it, she changes the subject. She doesn't dwell on her infirmities but is realistic about them. Occasionally she'll mention something she wants us to do when she's gone. We assure her we will. 

Summer 2012; Ruby and her niece, Mary Lou, who is
showing mom how to use the iPad she gave her.

Her mind, however, is amazing, and her horizons continue to expand. She is taking a writing class. She started using an iPad last year, and spends time every day on the Internet. She enjoys Facebook, which enables her to keep up with family and friends. Last week we discussed a book about the Franco-Prussian War she had stayed up late the previous night reading. "I didn't know much about that war," she said. "And I don't know what good it's going to do me to learn about it at this point, but I want to." She works her Sudoku puzzles and consistently wins at duplicate bridge. She has a new Scrabble partner, a woman 30 years her junior, and says she hopes she’ll someday be able to teach her to play well enough that she’ll actually have to work to beat her.

The movie "Lincoln" was released on DVD last week. Ruby went to see it in the Assisted Living Center's theater and sat on the front row, munching popcorn. She said Spielberg did a good job interpreting one of her favorite books, Doris Kearn Goodwin's "Team of Rivals."

Abraham Lincoln died 48 years before Ruby was born, and 18 years after that cask of Port was made.

I like to think that Ruby started out much as that ruby-colored Port did – as an ordinary vintage. Like the wine, she has, over time, transformed herself into something extraordinarily complex and strong with a character and substance that continues to evolve and improve.

Had she been born 50 years later, Ruby – of this I have no doubt – could have been anything she aspired to be. A banker. A journalist. A history professor, perhaps. She says she would have liked to have had a paying career.

My brother, sister and I are blessed to have been the beneficiaries of the unpaid career she took on in 1935 and continues to this day – as our mother. She is our rock, inspiration, joy and a source of pride and awe not only to us but to three generations of her extended family.

Here's a toast to you, Ruby Marie Tate Dryden See, on your one-hundredth birthday.

Two weeks ago: Ruby and her step-granddaughter, Samantha.