For awhile, I was a little concerned that I’d wind up an alcoholic from all the after-hours at Scholtz’s. Then I realized most of my beer got spewed out pre-swallow. Tell me how you can get more than three glugs down per hour when you’ve got to deal with this kind of scene: Mr. City Manager tries to introduce his assistant, let’s call him Mr. Brown (the pot wafting all over Austin back then has obliterated my memory of his real name) to Mr. Right-Wing legislator from Oil Gush, Texas. Mr. Brown is Austin’s first ever Black city official. Molly is next down the line, and then Ann, who back then was cheer-leader cute — no big hair, just a dawrlin’ little thang in jeans and Ropers with her hair all loose and natural. Mr. Right-Wing gives Mr. Manager a hearty hand shake and howdy-do, ignores Mr. Brown like he’s part of the fence they’re leaning on, scrunches his face into one of those fake polite wince-smiles as he gives Molly the two-finger limp fish, and puts his West Texas drawl charm on Ann: “And who’s THIS little lady?’ To which she responds, as she’s pumping his hand and flashing those big blue eyes over a grin as big as Houston, “Hi! I’m Mrs. Brown. So glad to meet you!”

By the 90s, I had three icons of the kind of woman I wished I could be: Barbara Jordon, Ann Richards, and Molly Ivins. Molly was always dearest to my heart, though, because she was my father’s way younger soul sister in the unrelenting tirade against social injustice. They never met, though Papa admired her and cherished his autographed copy of “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That Can She?” “For Lane Hammack, A long-time freedom fighter. Hang in and remember — the secret is to keep laughing. After all, we do have more to laugh about in Texas. With best wishes and admiration. Molly Ivins –”

Papa grew up in Kennedale, Texas, outside of Fort Worth. But rural Texas got rubbed off real quick when he went to the University of Texas, which even in the 30s was a hopeless den of liberal iniquity (chock full of intellectuals, and expansive thinking, and opera even). Actually it wasn’t the drama department’s opera productions that led him astray. It was the East Austin bands like Cab Callaway and Huddy Ledbetter that bent his mind forever and lured him back to Austin’s 60s and 70s music scene as often as he could get here.

Papa didn’t bang his pots and pans in print, like Molly did. He preferred yelling, especially in church. He was sort of an anti-Archie Bunker — the same gruff, in-your-face mein from an intellectual with a Texas drawl.

Before Molly was getting after the blockheads in the legislature, Papa was raising a nonstop ruckus with the suburban pseudo-Christians he accused of using church as nothing more than a sanctified social club. Instead of Bunker’s uneducated prejudiced Yankee yelling “meathead!” at liberals, Papa would yell, in his Fort Worth drawl, “You haven’t got the grey matter of a troglodite!” to the dodderheaded bigots in the Methodist church he helped start.

My earliest memories of Papa’s religious beliefs were that real Christians were people who accepted wholeheartedly the role as “my brother’s keeper.” The Bible verse that described his calling was “Whatever you have done for the least of these my bretheren, you have done also for me.”

One of his most fulfilling moments as adult Sunday school teacher at St. Matthews Methodist church in a whites-only “nice” neighborhood in 1960s San Antonio, was when more than half the class stormed out in a fit. The lesson that day was, “Who Are the Prophets of Our Time?” and Lane Hammack had the audacity to suggest that the list should include Martin Luther King.

Papa never lost his outrage style of religion, but he finally pretty much gave up on church when the fancy suits at SMMC threatened to take their big tithes elsewhere unless the pastor got rid of the choir director. Don West had an MFA and 20 years experience leading church choirs, including city-wide interdenominational choirs with hundreds of members. The problem with Don West was that he was a little too Black for the church-attendance-is-good-for-business set. Don West’s last gig at SMMC was Easter Sunday. My mother and I cried through the whole service, my father glowered at the suits, and my little brother just looked confused.

Molly autographed that book for Papa on January 15, 1992, five months before I had my first tussle with breast cancer. Papa died January 28, 1995. My second, and worse, breast cancer diagnosis happened last November. I was with my Mama in San Antonio on the 28th. She was remembering their post war romance by watching 40s operettas, you know where Nelson Eddy is singing an Indian love song (what Indian tribes sang like that?!!?) to Jeanette MacDonald as they ride horseback through the Canadian wilderness. When I need to remember good times with my Papa, I go to Threadgill’s and look at all the pictures of Armadillo World Headquarters concerts he went to with me.

Papa, Molly, January, senseless wars in Vietnam and Iraq, futile battles in too many breasts, good old Texas making me wait 111 days for health insurance even though I’ve got invasive breast cancer and 16 years state service total, the bobble head president still running the country, and Good Hair telling us everything is peachy keeno in Texas (after all we’re first in a long list of items, like people with no health insurance, lowest SAT scores, most dropouts, yeah!) — Last week I felt like I had a hurricane in my heart.

When I got back to Austin, I was checking online every day to see how Molly was doing. Wednesday morning no news. 5:30 pm I’m paralized at my desk. It’s over. No matter how senseibly I knew it was inevitable, I can’t only moan no no no no no. Now they’re all gone. I’ve lost my last guide, two days before my second cancer surgery this winter. (I tend to get breast cancer every time the Republicans run amok with Texas and the US of A as I want to know it.)

Still sore and loopy, I know I shouldn’t but also know I can’t not go to Molly’s memorial service. I have an overwhelming sense that my life depends on going to this service. In sort of a daze I park and walk several blocks to the First United Methodist Church. That church is 20 times as big the little fellowship hall we had Papa’s memorial service in. And the number of mourners equally large, but what happened Sunday, for me, was surreal… or super real?

When my father died, it seemed hypocritical to have his memorial service at the same church that drove him away in dispair, but somehow we kept winding up there no matter how much we tried to get set up at some place like the Witte Museum or Brackenridge Park. So the only way I figured this was supposed to happen was to find Don West and let Papa find Fred again after he died. Which we did. I opened the SA telephone book and called the first Don West I came to. The incredible thing was that the Easter Sunday debacle decades before destroyed my family’s relationship with church, but Mr. West could barely remember the event, he was so accustomed to being treated that way or worse.

So Sunday, I’m sitting in a different Methodist church a few decades later, but that January 28, 1995, Sunday is also here, somehow. I chalk it up to pain meds and post surgery weirdness. The videos of Molly memories remind me of the Papa stuff we displayed all over the fellowship hall, on those big fold-up tables. The gospel choir sings and I start getting disoriented, is it Don West and his wife? The minister talks about Molly’s rage against injustice in terms of John Donne’s poem, the same poem I printed on the first page of the program for Papa’s service, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” What is happening? Family and friends share, one after the other, the humor and passion that personified Molly Ivins, and the voices echo the comments shared in that much smaller service in 1995. Marcia Ball and the rest break loose into the kind of music one of my father’s favorite blues singers– Josh White? — called “Rock Church.” Now I’m transported somewhere else that isn’t Austin, isn’t San Antonio, not 1995 or 2007. When the Marcia’s mike started acting up a bit, just like Mr. West’s did during one of his songs back on that other Sunday, I finally had to just let whatever was happening take over.

For all my life and especially the last 5 years, I’ve been in a rage that took up so much space there wasn’t room for even a chuckle. My unfocused fury wasn’t good at anything except burying itself in my breast and eating me up from the inside out. Last weekend, somehow, someway that is beyond happenstance or reason, 58 years of grief finally found its way out of the very core of my being.

The only way I knew how to stick up for the weak was what Papa taught me — to be outraged with all my heart soul and body. I thought I could never get over losing my Ragin Rock n’ Roll Methodist Papa. A Texas with no Barbara, Ann, or Molly left my soul homeless.

Then Sunday I finally “got it.” It’s been 32 years since I started my little secretary job across the landing from the Texas Observer and first encountered the unsinkable Molly Ivins.

Molly Molly. The memorial of your way too short life might possibly save mine. I must’a heard you say it at least 1000 times. Laugh! And in every column, with every comment, you did. But it took the grief and the joy of your life and my Papa’s life and my life and my cancer and our outrage and the Methodist church and Fred all swirled together for the how to finally take form in my soul. I think I’m finally stumbling onto a new way of freedon-fighting. Maybe I can finally remember to laugh. Thanks Molly.

With love and admiration,
Susan

And your writin’ sure did enlighten and sure did entertain
The world without you can never be the same.

You were a national treasure, someone said
Now’s a hellava time for you to be No more read.

A time of war, lies, and deceit, that voice of yours could not defeat
But sure could expose without retreat.

You gave us your insight and foresight with no meaning hid
And we are so very glad that you did.

You left us too soon, not picking the year
You knew cancer would kill you, but didn’t seem to fear.

You thought cancer couldn’t make you a better person when all is done
That’s simply because you were already as good as they come.

You are perhaps the best friend I never actually drank with. Out of serial misery, your voice reminded me that bad politics and politicans all fall. I take a deep breath with your columns and righten my course, tack into the wind one more time. I am a little more alone without your voice.

“Hey, look around Bub, your arms aren’t broken are they? Get to work, then!” OK Molly, OK, but can you meet me at the Backdoor Tap?

Maryville, TN

The comparison to John Lennon above rings true. Sincere condolences to her friends and family.

Molly, I will miss you so much. It always made my day when I would open the ultra conservative Savannah Morning News and find one of your cloumns there. The managing editor, a friend of mine and an admirer of yours, said you always generated the most mail, both in support and in cries for your column to be withdrawn. When I lost much of my sight I found ways to read you on the Internet with large print and screen readers.
Everything I knew about W. came from you until he stole the Preeidency and I could see for myself. I’ve read all your books. All my liberal friends in Georgia will miss you. We really don’t know what we will do without you! May your spirit find peace and may you always be remembered for telling the truth when many refused to hear it, always with a smile and your quick wit.

Jan Elders
Tybee Island, GA