Twenty Years

     There are some events in your life that you never forget: the birth of a child, the day you met the person who would change your life forever, the death of a parent. Right now I'm thinking of my Mom. It's twenty years that she's gone and there isn't a day that goes by that I don't think of her.
     My Mom was not perfect but she was a unique woman. She didn't always have an easy life but she never really complained about it. She fully expected to die at the age of forty, as had her mother and grandmother, and when she didn't she treated the years that came after as gravy. She had a good sense of humor and laughed about the fact that the first thing she read in the newspaper every day was the death notices. She called them "The Irish Comics" and always found something to laugh at when reading them. She often commented on the fact that people would spend an arm and a leg for them. (For those of you who have never thought about it the cost of a death notice in the local paper can be quite expensive. Last I checked it was eight to ten dollars a line and that's without a picture.)
     I won't say my Mom was perfect, hell none of us are, and we argued quite a bit, because she always knew how to press my buttons, but we also got to that point where we were friends. I was the one who never left home so I was the one who got to hear all the stories, and she had a lot of them. The woman remembered every outfit she ever wore, every movie she ever saw and all the books she read. The love of movies and books I picked up on but I never really got that love of clothes; I can however describe in detail the dresses I wore for First Communion, grade school and high school graduation. Yes, I am my Mother's daughter in many respects.
     She had one story about meeting a friend for dinner. It was summer and she had a yellow dress and black accessories; hat, gloves, shoes and handbag were all black. The problem was the gloves. They were three-quarter length and did I mention it was summer? Well all was fine until they got to the restaurant and she went to remove her gloves and found that the dye from the gloves had come off on her arms. She ate dinner wearing the gloves.
     She was twenty-one when the US entered WWII and she was a registered nurse. Unlike many of her classmates she did not volunteer to serve. He father had died the beginning of 1941 and she wanted to stay in Philadelphia to be close to her two younger brothers who were still in school. She worked as a private duty nurse for a while and earned the exorbitant salary of $50.00 a month for working twelve hours a day, six days a week.    
     My siblings and I kidded that Mom was a nurse but she always tended to diagnose the ailments of her kids as 1.- Gas or 2.- Too much makeup. (My brother never had to worry about number two and neither did I for that matter.) I remember having the measles when I was in first grade and how sick I was and the care my Mom lavished on me. I remember the first time I saw her cry was when my youngest sister had pneumonia when she was about nine months old and she had to be hospitalized. It killed her that she had to leave her baby in the hands of others. I didn't see her cry again for almost twenty years and that was when my Dad passed away.
     When Mom went in the hospital that September day in 1992 she had the knowledge deep in her soul somewhere that she wouldn't be home again. She was hospitalized for over a hundred days before she died and in those days she prepared us for her death. She told us what to put in her death notice, the songs she wanted at her mass, the clothes to dress her in, where to have lunch and what to eat. The thing about those conversations was that she made a joke of them. We laughed when we talked about having soup at the buffet after her funeral; she wanted the guests to have something to warm them up after standing out in the cold. When she did finally let go she waited for all of us to be in the hospital. She knew we would need to lean on each other more than she ever had before.          
     What else can I say? She loved her kids and thought family was the most important thing in the world. She was a great cook who never really followed a recipe. She loved to shop, especially for shoes and always over packed for a weekend away. She loved to sing. She was a night owl. She loved to talk on the phone and could spend hours chatting away. One of her favorite lines was that she had been vaccinated with a phonograph needle. She had a memory for people and once recognized an old schoolmate from behind more than thirty years after leaving grade school. She was not good with money and was dangerous with a credit card.

     She was Mary Katherine beloved wife, mother and sister. She was my Mom and I still miss her.    

Christmas for Me

     Christmas is almost upon us. We all tend to view the Season a bit differently depending on where we are in life.
     As a child  I looked at this time of year as being full of the bright shiny things I dreamed about having for my very own. That new two wheeler or a pair of skates. Going to see Santa was a huge deal in my family. Our tree sat on a platform and there was a train that went around that tree. The platform had chimney paper tacked on the sides and the space under it and behind that chimney paper was where presents got stored so there was enough space to walk through the living room.
     As teenager I looked at Christmas as a time away from school. A time to be shared more with friends than family. For a short time I got to play assistant Santa for my youngest sister. Helping to buy and hang decorations and setting up the tree was a step toward being an adult. And family traditions changed too. Gone was the platform and trains and now the tree was much taller (for a while it was even aluminum) and actually went up before Christmas eve. I met my friends for Midnight Mass and we all trooped back to one house where the parents welcomed us freezing girls into their kitchen and plied us with hot chocolate and cookies. There was a lot of laughter. The joy now came because we were focused more on others than ourselves.
     I got older. My friends became parents and we all got to that point in life where staying up late to kick up our heels became the exception rather than the rule in our lives. We also began to lose those closest to us. People moved and contact was lost. A classmate passes away and a parent dies far too soon. Keeping Christmas became something done for the children that came into my life. I decorated and shopped and wrapped presents and tried to make sure that those I loved had a good Christmas.
     Now my nieces have children of their own ranging from seventeen years to two months old. There is less decorating than there used to be and we are back to a short tree that sits atop a cabinet. Less lights are strung than in the past and there are fewer decorations gracing the rooms of my home. When you're in your sixties getting out that second or third huge container full of decorations just doesn't seem quite as necessary as it used to.
      I do my shopping online and my siblings and I stopped exchanging gifts because we've gotten to that point in our lives where if we want something we buy it for ourselves. We don't have the patience or the budgets that we used to. We still buy for the children in the family but the newest member is too young to know what is happening and the others no longer believe in Santa. A bit of the luster has gone off the day.
     Midnight Mass is a thing of the past too. My sister and brother-in-law and I have friends in on Christmas Eve and we eat delicious food and chat and catch up on each others lives. Come Christmas day we'll travel to my youngest sister's home and we'll all be together in one place. That is the best part of Christmas now. One niece with her husband and daughter will be there from Massachusetts and her brother will drive up from Virginia. My oldest niece and her three will be there too and most of the people I love most in the world will be together under the same roof. That is the greatest present.
     I will share time with my friends. The women who have been part of my life for decades that I'll sit down and share a long chat with, be it face to face, by phone or by video chat and the new friends that I spend a part of every day with in the virtual world online. All the lovely, strong, vibrant females that bring joy to my life simply by being a part of it.
      So Christmas has changed for me. It changes for each and every one of us as we grow older. If Christmas is not your holiday I'm sure there is another day or occasion during the year that means as much to you. Whatever that day or occasion is I hope you enjoy it and treasure it as much as I do Christmas.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! 

A Few Thoughts on Guns and Loss

     A score of children were lost on Friday to a young man, not much more than a child himself, who obviously had problems. He took his own life after ending the lives of twenty seven others. There is so much to blame that you don't know where to start. Access to firearms, check, access to the technology that can turn a gun into a means of massacre, check, lack of access to a mental health system that could have helped the gunman, check.
     There is no solution that will easily solve these problems. Funding is needed to make access to weapons more difficult. Funding is needed to provide care to those people who could commit such crimes. And where do we get that funding?
     We know that the NRA spends a huge amount of money every year lobbying to protect the rights of gun owners. Maybe a percentage of their budget should be appropriated to safeguard the public. I've seen figures from $200 million to more than $300 million as their budget for 2010. That is just the budget for one year. Imagine how much better our mental health system might be with that influx of funds. It wouldn't cure the problem bit it sure could help.
     Now this part is all me...based on what I know of the way things work. Make gun owners carry insurance. You carry insurance for your cars and your homes and your boats. What if every registered gun owner had to buy a policy that would cover them for use of their firearms. The law in most states makes sure you have a policy in order to drive a car in case something goes wrong. Well what if something goes wrong with a gun? Make sure there is a pool paid into for the damages that are inflicted to the families and community when these horrors happen. Because we all know it will happen again. It has happened time after time and public grief and the call for action will not keep it from happening again.  
     If responsible gun owners were going to have to pay for the losses caused by the few they may force better rules to be in place. Rules like mandatory trigger locks and the banning of military style weapons  sales to individuals. They would turn to the NRA and demand action be taken. There are safety labels galore on a ladder or an extension cord but I've never seen a warning label on a gun.
     It is true that people kill people. but people with guns can kill a lot of people in a very short period of time. People that might be six or sixty. Lets make it harder for this to happen. Please.

 



      

Thanksgiving Remembered

     It's Thanksgiving week 2012 and I've been wondering what I should write about. I finally settled on  Thanksgiving Days Past.
     When I was a kid we always had Thanksgiving dinner at my Grandmom's house. She lived in South Philadelphia in a small garden front twin home. It wasn't really a big house and when we arrived it was  as full as it could be. When I was very small it was my Grandmom, Grandpop, along with my Uncle Joey and Uncle Pete who also lived there; add in my Mom, Dad and the three of us kids and it got crowded.
     One thing you need to know is that my father made his living as a bartender in a neighborhood taproom. That taproom was right around the corner from my Grandmom's house. In Philadelphia the only days taprooms closed were Sundays and Election Days; that meant my father always had to work on Thanksgiving and because of that we had dinner early. I can't say I remember the exact time but it had to start before two in the afternoon.
     The table was always full. Too crowded to hold all the food. There was the requisite relish dish with celery stalks and black olives. The tiny bowls for the cole slaw that was always served. Dinner plates, the fancy little glasses for the tomato juice that was always part of a fancy meal and then the space in the middle for the serving bowls and platters. My grandmother always sat in the chair closest to the kitchen so she could jump up to refill anything that got emptied and to be sure her brothers were served first so they could leave the table and get away from the noisy kids. I remember those dinners as the best. There was always laughter.
     Invariably after dinner we would go and get out of the grownups way by going out on the enclosed front porch and counting the pennies in the jar my grandmother had on the kitchen sideboard. That would keep us busy for a long time. My father would have a quick nap and then would get up and walk around the corner to be at work by five. We were never in a rush to go home. Around seven or so my grandmother would put on the coffee pot and then it was time for turkey sandwiches followed by pie. Around nine my mother would get us all ready and we would either stand on the porch and watch for the bus to turn onto the avenue so we could make it to the corner and catch it before it passed or we would call a cab to get us all back to our part of the city.
     The last great Thanksgiving was in 1956. My youngest sister was an infant and it was the last year that my grandfather was with us. He died the following October and we had Thanksgiving 1957 in a restaurant. It would be more than 30 years before we did Thanksgiving in a restaurant again.
      Dinner moved to our house around 1970. It moved a few times after that as well but this is not the time for those memories.
     The funniest thing I remember about that Thanksgiving after my Grandpop died....We were having dinner at a nice restaurant on Chestnut Street and we were finishing up our meal. The waitress came over to see if we were all right and asked if we needed anything and my brother, who was six at the time piped right up, "Can we have seconds?"
     Have a great Thanksgiving everyone. Remember as you sit down to your table on Thursday that it might not seem to be an extraordinary day to you but it may be the building block of someone's treasured memory.        

     

Memories of Fear

I know, I know....Nobody does a blog two days in a row but here I am anyway.

     This morning I watched the CBS Sunday Morning Show and they did a piece on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It took me back to those days when I was a freshman at St. Hubert's and the real dread I lived in that October. But then I wasn't the only one living in fear. The entire nation was in the same boat.
     We were watching shows like 'The Jetsons', 'The Lucy Show' and 'The Beverly Hillbillies' on TV. They were all brand new that fall. Shelly Fabres was singing 'Johnny Angel' and Acker Bilk was playing 'Stranger on the Shore'. People were going to the movies to see 'The Longest Day'.
     I had to use Google to remind me of the TV and music and the movies of that year but I remember the fear on my own. I had nightmares for years about a sky full of planes heading south to defend us all. There was a real and palpable fear that the world could come to an end. Mine was the first generation who grew up under the cloud of nuclear war. We saw the power of what a single bomb could do in the photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We went through bomb drills in school.
     So many years later a touch of fear is still there. Not as bad as it once was but it hasn't completely gone away. The dream of all those planes does not come with the frequency it once did but it does show up every once in a while. When I see movies and TV shows that talk about the Cuban Missile Crisis I am reminded of that kernel of fear that resides in me and is mostly dormant now.
     I think of the history I have seen since that long ago October. A president and his brother were assassinated and so was MLK. We lived through the hell of Viet Nam and the horror of 9/11. We have had embassies and consulates attacked and Americans killed all over the globe but we have not been as close to the precipice of total destruction as we were that October so long ago.
     Thank God that cooler heads and diplomacy prevailed that October. Thank God that FEAR did not win.

  




     

Mid-October Rant, et cetera

     It is hard to fathom that it has been nearly a month since I last made an entry here but the calendar does not lie and it has been that long.
                                                             
     We are approaching the middle of October. Sometime in the next week we will welcome a new member to the family. My beautiful niece Elizabeth and her husband Will are due to become parents any day now. I'm thrilled that my brother is going to be a Grandpop. He'll be good at it.

     The other major event on my radar is the upcoming election and the divisiveness that is being engendered by it. I know that there are things I see in ads that make me want to scream because they are so patently false. Each side calling the other liars is to be expected. It has been going on since the birth of the country and the election of John Adams. What I truly resent are the lies that contend the president is either a Muslim or that he is not a citizen at all. I really thought these attacks were beneath contempt but they keep surfacing.
     The irony of the questions being raised about the President's religion makes me think of all the talk during the primaries of the problems that would be faced by Mr. Romney because he is a Mormon. I have not heard or seen a single thing attacking Mr. Romney's faith. Yet a man who has been a practicing Christian throughout his adulthood is having his beliefs questioned. With the questions about his faith and religion the haters are saying that the Muslims in this country are less. That they are to be feared and that they are terrorists bent on destroying the country. This couldn't be further from the truth. It is akin to the accusations raised in 1960 that the Pope would have a line direct to the White House should JFK be elected. We all know how that turned out.
     The accusations that the President is not a citizen are so ludicrous they should not need to be addressed but there is a certain millionaire who, whenever he is on TV, manages to cast these aspersions. I doubt that there is a person in the country who has had his citizenship more closely reviewed. If there was anything that could have been found or proven it would have been long before election day 2008.
     Personally I don't care what your politics are. Your politics like your religion is your own. The only thing I ask is that you vote your convictions and not your hate. And I ask that you vote. If you don't vote you have no right to complain about what might happen
     And that is the end of my rant.

     What other fun things have been going on? Well the new TV season is well and truly underway. And my guilty pleasure this season is 'The Neighbors' with Jami Gertz. It is dumb and silly and it makes me laugh. But then I do like Jami. Her comic timing has always been great. I also like 'Partners', 'The New Normal' and 'Go On'. None of these shows will go down in history but they all make me laugh and that is a blessing in this day and age. And if you're wondering about new dramas....well nothing new on the radar. I haven't been impressed. If there is something I'm missing just let me know.

     One final thing, I'm loving the Spotify music app. I make playlists that I can share with my friends and with the cost of only a few moments of commercials in the course of an hour it is priced just right at $0.00. If you like music and hate paying for it then check it out. You could do worse.

Mary Had a Little Lamb

     Have you ever said something and then been teased about it but you weren't exaggerating or boasting...you were simply stating a fact? That happened to me recently.
     Last month my sisters and I attended a baby shower for our niece. Liz is expecting her first child and as Great Aunts we were all looking forward to being there. My sister Eileen does all the shopping for such events (I shop only online) and she had seen something for the baby that came in a couple of different shapes. She was rattling off the choices and the word 'lamb' was no longer past her lips when I piped up "Yes, a lamb. Mom had my room decorated in lambs when I was born. I had a lamb on my crib and a rocking chair that played 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' and a night light that was a lamb." My sisters thought this was hilarious. I being the oldest actually had a decor for my childhood bedroom. They, and my brother, all being younger got my hand me downs and they had no memory of my lambs. (Except of course for what is left of that ceramic night light that I can't bear to part with.) So the gift was bought and it was indeed a lamb.
     That brings up up to yesterday, which just so happened to be my sixty-fourth birthday. I ran away from home in Philly to spend my weekend with my youngest sister and her wonderful husband in the peace and quiet of South Jersey. Said kid sister was making one of my favorite dinners, meatloaf, at my request. She also went out and bought a chocolate cherry bread pudding for dessert. Our brother, the soon to be grandfather, was also going to join us and my remaining sister had a dinner date with her hubby to celebrate his birthday.
     I was happily reading when the front door opened and the sister I hadn't expected to see came in with a bag containing some Hagen-Dazs Blueberry Crumble and jelly beans. And then a box also appeared. A box with a funny shape and a head sticking out. It was a Lamb, a white fluffy lamb with pink ribbons at her ears. The softest lamb you can imagine. My sister is a mush ball like me. A joke gift with a soft edge and a sweet heart. A sweet heart, I was informed later, that my sister had kissed before it was put inside my lamb.
     I am so blessed by my family. My mother always told us to love one another. We fought and had lots of disagreements when we were kids. And when I say we fought I mean the kind of fights that included fists and feet and slaps and screaming at the tops of our lungs. But then we grew up. We lost our father and we came kicking and screaming into adulthood. Twenty years ago we went through a protracted hospital stay and the death of our Mom. We learned to lean on each other and treasure what it meant to have siblings that you loved and that loved you , unreservedly, in return.  
     To get back to my lamb I think her name will be Pi. Yes like the number used to measure circles. I have checked and it is called an irrational and transcendental number. Sort of like my siblings and I. We might occasionally be irrational but we transcend that and love each other anyway.
     The next time you hear "Mary Had A Little Lamb" you can think of me and Pi.  
     Pictured below is Pi and right under her you'll see me and my great sisters and brother.
     I am indeed a very fortunate woman.