Evelyn Greenberg Peck: A Woman of Valor

I’ll echo my brother, Larry, in thanking you for joining us. It means more than you know.

It seems it wasn’t all that long ago that we were here with Mom for Dad’s service. Now, nine years later, it’s time to tell her goodbye.

When you sit down to put a eulogy together, you’re faced with a dilemma: you know how the story ends. But where do you start?

I started at the beginning, of course. In my head, wandering back to our house in Dresher. But I didn’t go where I thought I would. Instead, I found myself in my room with an old comic from my collection.

I don’t remember what it was for certain—it might’ve been Superman—but the cover featured a hero and villain speeding toward each other, all intense lines of action and determined expressions. It posed the question in big, bold letters: what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? An old paradox. And one that gave me my start.

I know what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object.

Because I knew Evelyn Peck. And Evelyn Peck was both.

Mom was a force to be reckoned with and a woman who held her ground for what she believed in.

She’s easy to talk about because nearly everything she did and said was memorable. The hard part is narrowing it down. There’s just so much.

Not long after I posted about her passing on Facebook, memories and stories from friends came pouring in. Many of them involved food and Mom’s cooking. Because, of course, they did. Nobody loved a kitchen more than Evelyn, who would bury you in very good brownies if she thought you gave her the opportunity, like the marching brooms in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

My friend Anne told me about the time she came to our house to play. Mom asked her if she wanted anything, and Anne said a jelly sandwich when she meant to say a peanut butter sandwich because she didn’t actually like jelly. But she was too embarrassed to correct herself, so she sat and pretended to enjoy every bite.

My friend Charlie stayed for a weekend. Mom was experimenting with new recipes for a Sisterhood function. She tried a pot roast marinated in coffee that was the best thing you’ve ever tasted, despite that description. But she couldn’t use it because it fell apart and wouldn’t present well, so she served it to us instead. We devoured it like a pricey filet thrown to the dogs, chowing down, asking for seconds, and praying for additional failed trials to land on our plates.

My friend Mike said Mom’s kitchen smelled like Jewish heaven and recalled her endless kindnesses, love, and smiles.

My friend John told me, “Please write down that her candor was overwhelming—and I loved her for it.”

She would’ve loved that.

Because Evelyn Greenberg Peck was a person of overwhelming candor and love. Someone she herself would’ve described as a real character. If she had an idea, you were gonna know about it. A plan? You were gonna do it. You might even have some say in the matter. But probably not.

When we were kids, she’d wake us up before sunrise, singing “Rise and Shine” at full volume. She’d always make sure we beat the morning traffic out of the Philadelphia area, and we’d head south for 10 hours until we reached Greensboro to visit my grandfather, my brother and I asleep in the rear of our old Plymouth Fury III station wagon, laid out on tartan mats patched with electrical tape, waking up somewhere near Baltimore to do battle for turf as quietly as we could so she and Dad wouldn’t catch on.

At some point, when we were little, Dad began a running joke on road trips. We’d approach a crossing, and he’d say, “Here comes the bridge that Mommy built.” Driving over it, we’d all agree, “This is the bridge that Mommy built.” I never actually understood the gag. But I didn’t need to. Mom made plans, and off we went.

To Cape Kennedy to watch Biosatellite 3, the project Dad worked on, launch into the darkness before dawn. To Myrtle Beach. Six Flags. The Auto Train to Disney World. And the time I came home from New York City for Thanksgiving, got up at some ungodly hour—it was always some ungodly hour—so we could drive back to Manhattan in a punishing downpour and visit Ellis Island as a family, then drive back to suburban Philly to continue the holiday weekend. Never mind that I could’ve just stayed in New York and met them on Ellis Island some other weekend. That was not the plan.

She once told me that when Dad proposed, she got a call from a guy who’d gone silent on her after a date some time before. Now he wanted to know if she was busy that weekend.

“I’m busy for the rest of my life,” she told him.

And anyone who knew her knows she was. 

All those plans. All those events.

The cakes she baked—made to order for the birthday boy. My brother and I were predictable, going with chocolate every year because her chocolate cake was a gift all its own, topped with baseball players on a diamond laid out in icing. Or wooden antique cars at an intersection drawn in sweetness. The Shabbat dinners she cooked—always fresh, never leftovers—to make Friday night after sundown a special occasion. The candles she lit. The prayers we recited and sang together.

For Hannukah, she’d make and decorate cookies and bring them into school to explain the holiday to the class. When we went to camp, she sewed or ironed name tags into all our clothes. Nothing was done halfway. Nothing.

Just ask her fellow Hadassah members. Or the people at River Garden, where she took over running the gift shop, ordering and pricing merchandise, conceiving and creating display windows, conjuring record amounts of revenue into the cash register to help the home.

Ask my brother, who was planning on staying at River Garden while Mom had her procedure. After Mom passed, he went into her apartment, opened the refrigerator while he was on the phone with me, and found all his favorite fruit and food. She’d gone shopping, knowing he was coming.

Nothing halfway.

She never skimped on opinions, certainly, which is what my friend John meant when he mentioned her candor. If she loved something or someone? You were gonna know about it. If she didn’t? You’d know that, too.

Liza Minnelli was more talented than Judy Garland. NFL players’ hair should be short enough to hide beneath their helmets. Frank Sinatra was bulletproof until his later years, when he “just didn’t have it anymore.” Sarah Vaughn was Divine. Theodore Bikel was Fiddler’s perfect Tevye. Topol…was not. And turkey should be cooked halfway, stashed in the ‘fridge overnight, and cooked the rest of the way on Thanksgiving Day so that it won’t be dry—food-safety rules be damned.

When I was a child, I knew who and what occupied the wrong side of the line based on whoever and whatever crossed or offended her—and I’m talking before I ever made it out of the single digits. It was like Richard Nixon’s enemies list, which is fitting because in the early ‘70s, our president was near the top of Mom’s roster of foes.

In fact, now that she’s left us, I feel comfortable enough to publicly name these villains for you today. They are: Nivea moisturizing lotion. Colonel Sanders. Overdone fish. Mel Brooks, especially for Blazing Saddles but not for Young Frankenstein. Women who wear their hair past a certain length by a certain age. Ethel Merman. The Acme supermarket. And Mario the barber.

To enjoy those things or people, to frequent those establishments, was a betrayal of Nature’s law. Until, that is, I was old enough to drive myself to Mario’s for a haircut, which Mom seemed OK with by then. Mario was always professionally friendly to me, and I briefly considered clearing the air about whatever had happened between them. But it mostly felt like it wasn’t, as the song from A Chorus Line says, something you’d want to discuss. (And I know that tune so well because of the love of Broadway I inherited from Mom.)

All her life, a fighter. Often for good reason. Sometimes just to fight. In a famous scene from the classic movie The Wild One, a woman asks Marlon Brando’s Johnny what he’s rebelling against. His answer: “What do you got?” Like Johnny, Mom wasn’t always choosy about her battles. But as my friend said, you had to love her for it just the same.

She was a fighter to the end. And, sadly, the end for Mom came so suddenly. So shockingly. That’s what makes this goodbye difficult. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. It wasn’t supposed to happen at all. I’m not really kidding when I tell you I thought she might outlive me, 30-year difference or no, just because she was a phenomenon all her own.

But now, surprising as it is, we gather to see Evelyn Peck off.

When things went wrong, they went wrong fast. The doctors laid the situation out, and we had a decision to make. Once we’d made it, Larry held his phone up to Mom so Renée and I could say goodbye, even though we’ll never know if she was able to hear us.

They shut it all down. I told her it was OK for her to go. That we’d be fine. Then we sat for a quiet minute or two, which was all we would have. And I thought: my mother is in this world with me. I still have a mother. But only for a few moments more. And then she’ll be gone. And then I won’t.

But.

Who am I to say?

I keep thinking of the movie Nomadland, and a line I often use whenever I part ways with people I like. People I care about. One of Frances McDormand’s fellow travelers tells her, “I never say a final goodbye. I always just say, ‘I’ll see you down the road.’”

Maybe we’re not saying a final goodbye to Evelyn, either. Maybe we’ll find her waiting for us. Sewing in nametags like the one I found in my kippah. Icing a chocolate cake. Or sticking a broom straw into a banana cake to see if it’s done. Baking mondel bread. Or cookies. Basting a pot roast that tastes like it came from God, never mind that it doesn’t present well. Or making a jelly sandwich for someone who wanted peanut butter but refuses to let her down.

Because of all Mom’s opinions, the strongest was that you only get one life, so you should make the best of it. Do the good you’re able to. Help as many people as you can. Do it with grace. With purpose. With the understanding that the result is the reward.

And what, in the end, is a more noble belief than that? For her? For us?

So.

Here’s to Evelyn Greenberg Peck. An outsized presence and a true force. She always did her best. And her best was something to behold.

Godspeed, Mom. Safe travels.

We’ll be OK.

We love you.

And we’ll see you down the road.

You know the one.

It goes over the bridge that Mommy built.