Mom

I do this every year and yet the novelty never grows old. I realized with a start yesterday morning that today, Friday the 13^th, is my Mom's birthday. YIKES! We are, despite what you are thinking at this very moment, reasonably close.

Mom raised six of us to adulthood without ever succumbing to the temptation to lose or drown anyone, so far. Knowing me as I do, I am forced to concede that couldn't have been an easy temptation to overcome, especially since I was the first and on many occasions, also the worst.

Mom had a child, no names please, who used to lock himself in the school lavatory while a student in Mrs. Brennan's kindergarten, more or less out of boredom. My mother's husband and our father (NOT named Who Art, though it does follow rather naturally), was a schoolteacher who used to go manic when this happened.

Mom was more mellow (and this child was, after all, already her third (‘two more than Mary had,’ she would say)) and would advise Mrs. Brennan when she’d call to go back to whatever she was doing and within ten minutes, her reluctant student would return like a skin-covered boomerang to the classroom. Sure enough, that's what happened every time.

Another of my siblings specialized in the art of the 'goodie bag'. A goodie bag was a plain brown lunch bag into which, as we wandered around behind Mom or Dad as they shopped, one of us would place items she wished to further explore outside the confines and strictures of the conventional mercantile environment (= take stuff home without paying for it).

This child very early in life developed and perfected the "what's mine is mine, but what's yours is negotiable" mindset which Mom always managed to overlook and forgive as she'd go through the day's catch while Kid Klepto readied for bed making sure to return to the merchant the items that had made the trip home with us.

My mother has survived the death of her spouse, catastrophic health situations, hardships and challenges of all varieties without a murmur of complaint. As I said, she raised six of her own and on more occasions than I'd like to recall she helped with advice on the two grandchildren of foreign manufacture.

She came to visit us while we lived in (then West) Germany, earning the nickname Oma Amerika from our daughter, Michelle (four at the time), who, because we'd picked Mom up at the Frankfurt am Main Flughafen, thought for months afterwards that this was where Oma Amerika lived. Turns out it was a little farther west and south.

Mom was never a fan of snow. I can remember as a child bundling up to play outside in Wanamassa, the first home my parents owned in New Jersey and waving up at her watching from the living room picture window while building a snowman on the front lawn. She always waved back but never offered to come outside.

Now when I call her, as I shall today because I completely blew the birthday card sending, I try to guess what time she'll be heading to the beach, as she moved to Florida over a decade ago and there’s not a hurricane that will ever make landfall that will dissuade her from staying there as she loves it.

She always calls me on my birthday, so turnabout is fair play because she is really the woman who made me what I am, literally and figuratively-even when I'm not the most attentive child, or son, that has ever walked the planet.

Happy birthday, Mom, love always and every good wish for many more happy birthdays to come.

-billy