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“Ma” by Leo Racicot

October 23, 2025 by DickH Posted in Uncategorized Leave a Comment

Ma

By Leo Racicot

Our mother was Edna Nemer, the youngest child of Adele Kalil, a Lowell mill girl and Raef (Ralph) Nemer, a Lowell barber. Her older siblings were Marie, Helen and George. Being the youngest earned our mother the nickname, Topsy. When she was six-months old, her father, Ralph died suddenly of a heart attack. Unable to see how she could raise four, young children and work to feed and clothe them, Nana placed them in Franco American Orphanage on Pawtucket Street where they remained until they were of legal age to strike out on their own. Once free of an institution she hated (Ma once told me that whenever peas were served with meals, she disliked them so much, she’d hide them under her mashed potatoes until one day, one of the nuns caught her and boxed her ears till they bled. She and her sisters and brother carried the scars of the orphanage with them their whole lives. They loved their mother but always harbored a resentment towards her that she had put them “in that awful place”.

But, as I started to say, once released from “that prison”, Ma led a carefree life. She took work as a soda fountain girl at Teddy’s Variety in Cupples Square (her first job), loved it, often talked so fondly of her time there and made many friends in that neighborhood, including Prior who managed The First National grocery store, Mr. Page who ran Page’s Drugstore and George and Angie Malapanis and their sons, Costa (Dino) and Jimmy, of Terminal Fruit Co. Dino now operates the Speedy Check service out of the former Palmer News on Appleton Street. I’ve known Dino and Jimmy since we were little boys. Ma’s favorite activities were singing in her church choir and going with her gal pals to the races. She ran around with a crowd that liked to play the horses but more so than this, loved dog racing and would spend all their free time, weekends, and their money at Rockingham Park up in New Hampshire and Suffolk Downs in Boston. One boast Ma could make is that she hardly ever lost on bets. This caused her friends to dub her Lucky Edna. These gals would also get together for girls’ night every Thursday (eat out, go to the movies, shop for clothes and shoes), and this ritual continued well after all or most of them had married and started families. I still remember watching mother doll herself up on a Thursday night, seeing how excited she was to be going out on the town. Sometimes Diane and I would pout to our father that we wanted to go, too but Papa would patiently explain, “This is your mother’s special night out…You’ll see her in the morning….” One of her friends, Therese (Tessie) Proulx continued to keep these outings going long after Ma got sick and after the other ladies had died, and I remember her coming over to the house, gently taking Ma’s arm and leading her out to the car for their nighttime adventures. Madame Proulx lived to be 98 and at that age was still living by herself, doing her own chores and gardening, still driving a car! An amazing soul. I found her to be so inspiring.

Ma’s single lifestyle came to an end when she met and married our father when she was working at The Abbott Worsted in Forge Village and he was a soldier stationed at Fort Devens up the road. As she liked to tell it, Leo was a big hit with the ladies and she was wary of going out with him even though he kept pursuing her. When she finally agreed to go out on a date with him, she got cold feet and stood him up. “Do I want to go out with a Casanova??” Well, that only served to draw him in more and he finally promised “no more fooling around for me.” They fell in love, married in 1945, as WWII was ending. Not long after, Ma gave birth to me but had an extremely difficult childbirth, nearly died, and the doctor told my father, “No more children!”. But Papa wanted a girl and got his wish when two-and-a-half years later, my sister, Diane, was born. Ma had an equally touch-and-go time delivering Diane and once again, came close to dying. For one thing, Diane was a whopping 11.5 pounds at birth and came into this world with a full head of dark, wavy hair and eyes wide open. Ma always felt she and Papa should have heeded the doctor’s warning because the cancer no one knew Papa had and was to kill him four-and-a-half years later was transmitted to Diane, setting her on a path of multiple lifelong hospitalizations and ailments.

Papa became very sick very fast and passed away in November of 1960, leaving Ma bereft and torn. She resolved though to do for us as a single parent what would no longer be possible not that her husband was gone.

Edna May was a wonderful, wonderful mother, and I know all or most kids say that about their own moms. But Ma was even more wonderful than the most wonderful of mothers. Ma never had much but always saw to it that Diane and I had all we needed, many times going without what she needed to ensure that we thrived.

Ma knew how to do a lot with a little, and be resourceful. She never got her driver’s license (she liked to tell the story that the first time she got behind a wheel, she drove the car straight off the road into a ditch and said to herself, “Never again”) but saw to it my sister and I went everywhere she could take us. She’d walk us downtown, to eat at Lowell’s popular places: The Epicure, the Olympia, “The Chicken Place” on Central Street, to clothes and toy stores. Along with our aunts on our father’s side, Yvonne and Marguerite, and her Acre pal, Lillian Bourassa, she’d walk us from North Common all the way up to South Common for that park’s Fourth of July festivities. When she could afford it, she’d spring for a taxi cab to take us to places too far away to walk. In those days, Lowell sponsored lots of fun bus trips, and we went to Our Lady of LaSalette Shrine in Attleboro and made a great trip into Boston for a spaghetti meal in The Theater District. After, we went to The Paramount Theater (still there) to see How The West Was Won, filmed in a brand new mode of production, Cinerama whereby a movie was shot by three, separate cameras which when screened had the action happening all around you, making you feel you were in the movie. Thrilling! Most memorable of our trips, which I’ve written about before, was the week she treated Diane and me to a stay in a hotel at Hampton Beach. That trip I have never forgotten. When Ma was this age, she had the most striking features: large, brown, soulful eyes, a kewpie doll mouth and a voluptuous head of hair, so black it shone blue in the sunlight. I loved being out with her, walking with her, holding her strong, reassuring hand. She was not going to let anything bad happen to us, not after what had happened with Papa.

One morning in 1968, Ma didn’t get up early, as she usually did, and go into the kitchen to make breakfast. I went into her room and found her slumped half-in, half-out of her bed. The right side of her mouth was drooped and drooling. She was having trouble speaking. I called an ambulance and she was taken to Lowell General Hospital. She’d suffered a stroke in the night, a serious one. She was treated at Lowell General, then transported to Spaulding Rehab in Woburn, for recuperation. She was there for six weeks. She was so brave, worked hard to get better and came home fully rehabilitated. But, every time she brought herself back to herself, she’d have another stroke. These became very hard years, for her, for Diane, for me. I didn’t know then what I’ve learned since, that a stroke can and will alter a person’s behavior radically. Ma simply wasn’t herself anymore. We bickered a lot. Painful arguments destroyed the deep and loving bond we had. I’d always been painfully shy, almost pathologically so (some people had the affrontery to ask her, “So, is Little Leo retarded??”). I had trouble finding a job and this upset Ma a great deal. I’d always loved to write creatively. Beneath my inability t express myself verbally, I believed I was destined to become the next Hemingway, an American Proust. Of course, that wasn’t about to happen. So, we bickered and bickered and she had stroke after stroke. I tried very hard to help her through her situation. As she had taken Diane and me on all kinds of excursions, I did the same for Ma: I took her to the movies: E.T. (too long) and Robert Redford’s Ordinary People (its plot hit too close to home and triggered a fight). I drove her into Boston to see Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller in their hit musical, Sugar Babies. This seemed to brighten her spirits for the afternoon but I could see the trip exhausted her. The most telling sign of how bad our lives got was when she sold her wedding set (diamonds and band) so we could eat.

In November, 1984, I walked downtown to catch a bus on Bridge Street. It was snowing quite a lot — a storm was starting up. But I’d scored a rare job interview, out at Tewksbury State Hospital. Long story short, the bus never showed up. Fate had to have stepped in because I headed back home and when I walked in the house, I found Ma on the floor, her body half in the hallway, half in the living room; she was shaking/quaking, was snorting/gurgling heavily. She’d been trying to reach up to the phone. I called 911 and the ambulance came. It was Thanksgiving Eve. The doctor told us Ma had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. We were told there was nothing we could do but go home and wait for his call. Half in a state of shock and half not knowing what to do with ourselves in the aftermath of this shock, we began to prepare the foods for the next day’s holiday meal. I was chopping the onions for the stuffing when the phone rang. It was the hospital. The doctor said, “I’m sorry, Leo; your mother has passed away.”. Ma was 63 years old.

Looking back, I can see that my mother never recovered from the death of her husband after only eight brief years of marriage. Surely, the stress and worry of having to raise two, young children alone led to her strokes. I did my best, in my own kid way, to cheer her, lift her spirits, and make her laugh. One New Year’s Eve, I remember I made a small party for her — complete with pretend highballs and lots of confetti rigged to rain down on her at the stroke of midnight. But she just wasn’t interested. None, or few, of my efforts could wrest her from the deep depression she’d fallen into for years. She missed Papa too much and had taken herself way beyond all attempts made to comfort her.

The world is never the same after our mothers leave us. Ma had given us Life and now that Life had to go on without her. She was truly the bravest soul I’d known and taught me the lesson of perseverance in the face of adversity. I think of a maxim she would often say, “It’s a great Life, if you don’t weaken.” She also demonstrated that love, real love, is selfless. I think of her every day of my life, more so when the Fall of the year comes around….