A Woman Who Found a Way to Write

July 24, 2005
A Woman Who Found a Way to Write
By MAUREEN DOWD
MY mom always wanted to be a writer. In 1926, when she was 18, she applied for a job at The Washington Post. An editor there told her that the characters she'd meet as a reporter were far too shady for a nice young lady.
But someone who wants to write will find a way to write. And someone who wants to change the world can do it without a big platform or high-profile byline.
Besides raising five kids in high heels, my mom wrote with a prolific verve that would have impressed one of her idols, Abigail Adams.
In her distinct looping penmanship, learned from the nuns at Holy Cross Academy in Washington, she regularly dashed off missives to politicians. I'd often see form-letter responses on her table from the White House or Congress.
She loved Ronald Reagan and when he landed in a firestorm, she'd write to tell him to buck up. She also appreciated Bill Clinton - his sunny style, his self-wounding insecurity and his work on the Ireland peace process - and would write to compliment him as well. (Literally catholic, she liked both Monica and Hillary.)
She wrote to any member of Congress who made what she considered the cardinal sin of referring to Edmund Burke as a British, rather than Irish, statesman.
In 1995, after reading a newspaper analysis suggesting that Al Gore was not sexy enough to run for president, Mom swiftly dashed off a note reassuring the vice president that he was sexy and that he'd done a great job as host of Pope John Paul II's visit to Baltimore.
She carefully addressed it, "The Honorable Albert Gore Jr., Home of the Vice President, Observatory Circle; 37th Street and Massachusetts Avenue, Northwest, Washington, D.C." The letter was returned a few days later, stamped "Addressee Unknown."
It was an omen.
She wrote her last name in black marker on the bottom of the Tupperware she used to bring food to anyone in her building or sodality or family who was under the weather or having a party. On holidays, plates of food were always handed out to those in the building who had to work or might be lonely before she served her family.
When her dinner rolls stuffed with turkey and ham were snapped up at my first cocktail party, as the expensive catered cheese wheel and goose pâtés went untouched, she told me with a smug smile: "Simplicity pays."
Mom - a woman who always carried a small bottle of Tabasco in her purse - wrote out hundreds of recipes, adding notations of her own, including Mamie Eisenhower's Million Dollar Fudge (1955), which she deemed "Rich as Croesus, but oh so good," Mrs. Nixon's Hot Chicken Salad and Barbara Bush's High Fiber Bran Muffins.
In the middle of her recipe cards, she wrote down a quote that appealed to her: "The Talmud says, If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?"
When my mom still hoped I would transcend takeout, she'd write away for booklets for me: "150 Favorite Pickle Recipes From Iowa," "Confessions of a Kraut Lover" from Empire State Pickling and "How to Cook With Budweiser," including a chocolate beer cake.
Without ever mentioning it to anyone, she constantly wrote out a stream of very small checks from her police widow's pension for children who were sick and poor.
She didn't limit her charity to poor kids. When 6-year-old Al Gore III was struck by a car in 1989, she sent him a get-well card and a crisp dollar bill. "Children like getting a little treat when they're not feeling well," she explained.
She had a column, "Under the Capitol Dome," in the National Hibernian Digest. In 1972, she chronicled her debut, at 63, as a protester.
After Bloody Sunday, when British soldiers fired on a Catholic demonstration in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, killing 13 people, Mom went to the Kennedy Center in Washington to picket the British ambassador, who was going to a performance of the Royal Scots Guards. She proudly wore her green Irish tweed cape and waved a placard reading, "Stop killing innocent civilians."
"The triumph of the evening," she wrote in her column, "was when the British ambassador had to be taken in through a basement door."
She wrote me relentlessly when I moved to New York in 1981 with everything from fashion tips ("Hang your necklaces inside your blouse so your bra will catch them if the clasp breaks") to strategy on breakups ("Put all his pictures in a place you won't see them, preferably the trash") to health tips ("I hope you will never take a drink when you are unhappy. It would break my heart to think you had become a jobless derelict, an easy prey for unscrupulous men, me dead, and a family who held you in contempt because you had tossed aside your beauty, youth and talent.").
Mom was not famous, but she was remarkable. Her library included Oscar Wilde, Civil War chronicles, Irish history and poetry books, as well as "Writing to the Point: Six Basic Steps," and the 1979 "Ever Since Adam and Eve: The Satisfactions of Housewifery and Motherhood in the Age of Do-Your-Own-Thing.'"
As her friend Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, eulogized her last week: "She was venerable without any of the fuss of venerability; worldly, but thoroughly incorruptible; hilarious, but ruthlessly in earnest; unexpected, but magnificently consistent; wicked, but good. She could be skeptical and sentimental in the very same moment. She set things right just by being in the midst of them."
When I told her I was thinking of writing a memoir, she dryly remarked, "Of whom?" And when reporters just starting out asked her for advice about journalism, she replied sagely: "Get on the front page a lot and use the word 'allegedly' a lot." The daughter of a manager of an Irish bar named Meenehan's, with a side entrance marked Ladies' Only, she grew up in a Washington that was still a small Southern village with horses and carriages. As a child she saw the last of the Civil War veterans marching in Memorial Day parades, and as the wife of a D.C. police inspector she made friends with her neighbor, Pop Seymour, the last person alive who saw Lincoln shot at Ford's Theater. (He was 5 and saw the president slump in his box.)
Intensely patriotic, a politics and history buff, in her life she spanned the crash of the Titanic to the crash of the twin towers, Teddy Roosevelt to W. One of her big thrills came in 1990 when she went to the White House Christmas party with me and President Bush gave her a kiss. On the way home, she said to me in a steely voice, "I don't ever want you to be mean to that man again."
As my mom lay in pain, at 97 her organs finally shutting down, my sister asked her if she would like a highball. Over the last six years, Mom had managed to get through going into a wheelchair and losing her sight, all without painkillers or antidepressants - just her usual evening glass of bourbon and soda.
Her sense of taste was gone, and she could no longer speak, but she nodded, game as ever, just to show us you can have life even in death. We flavored her spoonful of ice chips with bourbon, soon followed by a morphine chaser.
Peggy Dowd died last Sunday at 6:30 a.m. I'm not sure if she was trying to keep breathing until the 8:30 a.m. Mass for shut-ins or Tim Russert's "Meet the Press."
I just know that I will follow the advice she gave me in a letter while I was in college, after I didn't get asked to a Valentine's Day dance. She sent me a check for $15 and told me to always buy something red if you're blue - a lipstick, a dress.
"It will be your 'Red Badge of Courage,' " she wrote. And courage was a subject the lady knew something about