My Extraordinary Ordinary Life by Sissy Spacek, Maryanne Vollers Read Free Book Online

remember best about him were his hands, which danced lightly over my face and ponytail whenever I ran up to greet him. It was his way of seeing me. Because Papa was so much older than Big Mama, he never expected to outlive her. And nobody could believe it when she died after a short illness at age sixty-one. I traveled with my mother down to Mission to see her before she died. Big Mama always had beautiful long hair, but when she took to her sickbed she cut it off into a blunt bob. It looked so strange to me. That’s probably why I never want to cut my own hair. I remember her looking up from her bed and smiling at me, and that was the last time I saw her. Papa died a year and a half later.
    I was too young to really understand what death was when I lost three of my grandparents, all within a couple of years. I just knew that for a while I had them, and then they were gone. During this time, my mother also lost two babies. Yet I never remember her complaining, or even being cross with us. She had a strong faith, but not a completely conventional one. Even though we attended church every Sunday, my mother never bought into the traditional view that God was an external deity who ruled his kingdom from above. She always told me, “The kingdom of heaven is within,” and “God is love,” not restricted to any religion. A thumb-worn copy of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking was always nearby. She believed that what happens to you in this world isn’t as important as how you respond to it. She could find God in the daily routines of life, and I must have absorbed those lessons from her, because it’s what I believe. I find the divine in the ordinary, a miracle in every breath. And like her, I try to keep things simple.
    Mother told me that when she went through Big Mama’s things after she died, she found lacey handkerchiefs and other precious gifts that she’d saved but never used. My mother encouraged me to enjoy the beautiful things that surround me, not just put them up on a shelf to admire or hide them away in a drawer. And that’s just what I do. I use things up, wear my favorite clothes until they have holes, put the good rugs on the floor in the hallway, and stir my coffee with Big Mama’s silver spoons.
    Sometimes I hear myself repeating my mother’s favorite sayings. She seemed to have something to fit every occasion. Some were rather pointed (“Pretty is as pretty does,” and when she caught me chomping my chewing gum: “That’s cute now, Sissy, but pretty soon it won’t be very cute....”). Whenever I wished I was taller or didn’t have freckles, I was likely to hear “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” But my favorite was: “Don’t kick against the pricks.” Anyone who has grown up in cactus country will instantly understand the meaning of this advice. But I have found myself repeating it often in New York and Hollywood, and it seems wiser all the time.
    And now I know that everything we tell our children probably doesn’t go in one ear and out the other; it really does stick somewhere inside those little heads of theirs. If you ask me to list all the wonderful things my mother told me, I couldn’t. But they always seem to come to me when I need them most.

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    My mother was not a stay-at-home housewife; she took a part-time job typing up documents for Don Roberts’s abstract company. Those were the days before Xerox machines, and all the property deeds and liens had to be copied by hand. Her office was in the county courthouse, and she was proud to be one of the fastest typists around. I loved visiting her at work. She was a modern woman and very stylish. She often had her clothes made from Vogue patterns and wore high-heeled shoes that would click on the marble floors when she carried those heavy, leather-bound deed books across the hallway to her desk. Then I’d watch her red-painted fingernails fly across the keys.
    Her office was located on the