I do this every year
and yet the novelty never grows old. I realized with a start yesterday morning
that today, Friday the 13th,
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.
-billy
