Mom and Dad's 63rd Anniversary

Had my mother lived, March 4th would have been their anniversary.  I always hesitate to make much of it, especially now that she is gone.  Theirs was a very rocky road.  I don't carry many happy memories between the two of them.  My father is not and has not been one to celebrate such things... or Christmas, or Birthdays...so it was, for me, something I recognized for her, not him.  ( If you've read me for any length of time, I have shared that when we lived in South Carolina, I called her local florist and had flowers delivered for an anniversary, signed "Your favorite daughter".  They only have 2.... Mom guessed wrong.   I had forewarned my sister so to us,  it was funny.  I was out of state, the florist was local so she just assumed it was my sister.  So..... the next year.... I did it again.  You would think she would have known then.  Nope!   My sister got the credit then too.  So that was a running joke for years.  Mom was not happy.  We were laughing at her and she did not appreciate it.  (We did.)

This photo was taken of Gerald and Nancy in May of 1950.  Mom was 19, Dad may have had his 22nd, May 26th Birthday.  Mom would be 20 in June and I would arrive in July.  They look happy.  They had left all they knew of family and friends in Missouri, in the rear view mirror,  as they made their way to Flint, Michigan so Dad could work for General Motors. 

I have mentioned previously that they were married March 4th, 1949, when they were 18 and 21.  They had only dated a few weeks.  They eloped, with friends serving as their witnesses.  Then, (my grandmother told my sister and I when we were in our 20s...that they kept the marriage secret,and went home to their respective parent's homes for 3 months.   I've never gotten a straight answer on the "whys" of that.  I think I need to sic  YFS (your favorite sister...) on that with my dad.

This is from their 25th anniversay party that my sister planned.  YFS, Mom, dad, my brother and me, March, 1974.


My father will be 85 in May.  I wonder if he even knew that anniversary has passed.

Yes, You Do

I was reading a post yesterday from one of my favorite bloggers,  Deanna  at My Loves, My Life.  She mentioned in her "Now I Know" post,  that her mother would tell her about the passing of her mother's numerous cousins, most  of which  Deanna didn't know.  I can so relate to that coming from my mother too.

Only my mother, who has been gone for 5 years now, would also include bits of gossip, marriages, divorces and births of children to people I had never heard of.   I would tell her, " Mom, I don't know who that is."  She'd answer, "Yes you do."    No, I really don't know who that is.  So then she would give me directions to their house or tell me how they were related to someone I went to high school with 40 years ago. 

She had worked at the Head Cashier in the only grocery store in town, for about 20 years.  She knew everyone and if she ran across someone she didn't know, she'd introduce herself.  She'd tell this stranger who her children were and how old we were.  My oldest daughter Kathy is 56. ( Now I'm older! ha!)  Thank you Mom for sharing that bit of information. 

I remember on one instance she hired a new cleaning lady to help with the vacuuming and dusting. ( Mom was 70ish years old and deserved a break.)   She told me who it was and it really was someone I had gone to high school with.  Her last name started with a P and so did mine.  We were either in the same row of desks or close by one another all through school.  That was my total knowledge of her. So, the first time I happen to go visit Mom when "Mary" is there, Mom tells me... "Go say hello to her."   She was in the bathroom with her head in a toilet bowl.  I didn't want to say hello.  She didn't even know I was there.  Mom pointed her finger at me and said " Go. Say. Hello."  I went.  I was 55 years old and I did as I was told.  Neither of us knew what to say to one another, but I was following orders.

Mom suffered for decades, from Fibromyalgia, so there were many days she couldn't get out of bed.  On some of these days, because I lived close, I was her surrogate.  She would call and say, " I need you to go to a funeral for me."  I may have heard the name of the person before, but I sure didn't know them.  "Yes you do", she'd say.   So, off I'd go.  I'd have to explain I was there for Mom.  Awkward.....

She would also do the same thing to my daughters.  This is what happens when we all lived in the same town.  My girls went to the same High School I did.  The funny thing was when she would try it with my sister, who had left town at 20 years old and lived about 30 minutes away.  "You know Ruth.  She grew up in the blue house across from the Post Office and married your old boyfriend "Jiummy's" cousin Steve?  You know them.  " No I don't"....... "Yes, you do."  There was no arguing with Grammy. 

Then she discovered genealogy.  Good heavens.  That opened the flood gates on more people we didn't know.  More to the point... people she didn't know either.  That didn't slow her down.  She would find long lost, distant relatives that she would email or write letters to  and then tell us about the marriages and deaths in their families.  Good grief.  I told her I was waiting for the movie.

Sadly, I heard her words coming out of my mouth.  When Rachel (daughter #2) was with us on the last cruise, one morning for breakfast, eggs sunny side up were on the menu.  She ordered them.  I told her " You don't like those."  She said, "How do you know that?"  I told her I know her.  And I was right.  She likes eggs "over easy', not sunny side up.     Instead of saying "Yes, you do" -  I had said "No, you don't". 

Mom, This Is For You

                                                                          Nancy at  14

Monday marked 5 years that Mom has been gone.  I don't like to say it's an anniversary because that sounds like something to celebrate and that's not what I feel.  I  celebrate her Birthday and try not to give much credence to the day she left us.  I only made a brief mention on Facebook of it being a long day.  My sister responded, "I hear ya".  That's all that was needed.  This year, though, I'm stuck.  So, I'm giving this post to Mom today.  I think she's been sitting on shoulder nagging me to do something positive.  So, here Mom, are some of your favorite things.


1.  Anything pink, but rosebushes are best.

2.   Two Favorite Movies were:

                                                                            and

3.  She liked Elvis Gospel music, Il Divo, Barbra Streisand, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton.

4.  Books and books and more books: Nora Roberts, Taylor Caldwell, and Danielle Steel

5.  And of course, she loved us.  All of her children, her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren.  No, we weren't at the bottom of her list, but if I had started with each of us at the top, there would have been no more room. 


So these are a few of Mom's favorites I know she would have shared with you.  She would have shared much more and told you all of my stories and those of my sister and brother as well.  To say she never met a stranger is very apt.  Who knows what she would have said in a blog or on Facebook, but I do know she would have had followers for sure.

Shut the Front Door!

Slap Your Mama  ....What does that mean anyway?  I gather it means "Good job!", "awesome", etc, all out great.  Better than great even.

There have been all kinds of slang and catch phrases through the years.  We Boomers have gone through decades of our own.  :There are generational phrases and words and there are regional ones.

There are ones that we hold onto and others that are no longer pertinent in our lives.  Mostly we don't want to appear dated or more likely, ridiculous.  "far out, groovy and right on" come to mind.

My husband grew up in northern Michigan just south of the Mackinac Bridge that connects the lower and upper peninsulas of Michigan.  He went to college in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan which also has a bridge that connects it to Sault Ste. Marie, Canada.   Living that close to Canada, as long as I've known him he has used Canada's # 1 slang export. "Ay?"  pronouced "A".  Down here, at the Marine base, the guys kid him about it.  It's regional, ay?

The words and phrases that amuse me most are the ones that I say still, that came from my Mother.  Just last night Terry and I were changing our sheets on the bed.  They are t-shirt sheets that have stretched out and are no longer square , so I told him they were "Whoppiejawed".  He calmly said, "That's your mother ."  Of course it is.  So is Cattywampus.. What the heck?  Also "Stoop".  If your porch is not big enough to qualify as a porch, it is a stoop. Right?  Terry had never heard that before he met my mother ( and me apparently). The one that drives him nuts is "stuffy".  I cannot breathe  if the room or car is stuffy.  I think he's heard that a few times over the last 30 years.  How do northerners communicate without these colorful terms? 

Mom with my younger daughters when they were little, about 20 years ago.  They are 26 and 28 now.  They had many saturday night sleepovers in Grammy's big bed. 

I know, when we were children, my mother would say "See ya later alligator" to us and wait for the "after while crocodile."  She had my daughters saying it when they were little too.  So, forget the whole "Kibash".  No way.  I say "Heebie Jeebies" but I'm not sure if I got that from my mother.
.

I've also said " Run around like a chicken with its head cut off",     Unfortunately, I saw that at about 5 years old, at one of my grandmother's and that's a sight that sticks with you. Lordy......

 My father may have his favorites too, but because he worked nights and I was in school or working during the day, I rarely spent any time with him.  In later years, after he retired, he was and is pretty much a loner so I didn't have the hours and hours of time with him like I did my mother.  Her slang greatly influenced mine.  

She had others that I didn't adopt.  For instance: " Piddlin, Fit to be Tied, and Walking in Tall Cotton." 

 I'm sure my daughters could have their own list.  Some of these have to stuck with them too.

Do you hear your parents slang or phrases coming out of your own mouth too?  I'd love to hear what they are.   I can't be the only one brainwashed out here.

What's in Your Mail?

The mailboxes for our condo community are all in one area, about 4 units from me.   I  either pick up the mail on my way to or from somewhere when I'm in the car.  Once in a while I'll walk down to get it.  It's just not that entertaining anymore. At least 80% is junk mail.  I pay about half of our bills on line.  Some I have to mail.  So, other than Terry's Sport's Illustrated and my Entertainment Weekly, we don't get much mail. 

I remember a time when that wasn't true.  I remember a time when mail was the highlight of the day. As a girl,  I remember my mother watching for the mailman, eager to see if she got a letter that day and who sent updates from across the state or across the country.  I remember moving to South Carolina from Michigan, away from family and friends when Daughter #1 was a freshman in college there and the younger girls were 7 and 9 years old.  Somehow we got hooked on stickers and had them for all occasions and for no reason at all.  I wrote and the girls wrote long rambling letters of "missing you"  to Daughter #1 and to their Grammy, in envelopes covered with stickers. 

As the years went on new technology took over our lives and letters were mailed less and less.  My mother, although, on line and hooked up, still wrote letters to her friends from the past.  While Daughter # 3 was working  in the Tetons, Grammy still mailed stickered letters.   When my Mom passed away, we found a letter, half written, to her,  on the bed.  What a touching keepsake for my daughter.


Now I live far from my girls but I don't write letters to them.  We talk, we text and we email.  In thinking about this post I realized the last letters I have written have been to soldiers I don't know.  I have mentioned before, that I have, for years, sent care packages through http://www.anysoldier.com/ and I mailed out another one about 2 weeks ago.   I write letters to stick inside the boxes just to say Thank You for all they do.  Then I ramble, like my mother taught me, about things around me.

Last night while I was reading my book, I read about a modern day teacher that was given a hatbox full of diaries and letters from two women that became friends in the 1920s and stayed in contact over the decades.  This was just a story line but somewhere there are real hat boxes and cigar boxes full of letters saved from family or romances long gone.  There are books of love letters and letters to home,  written by soldiers in all the wars.   While texts and Facebook have their place and I am glad for their existence, I am sorry to see letter writing go.

Do you remember, on what occasion you last wrote or received a letter?  If I weren't doing soldier boxes, I wouldn't know.  I am sure the last letter I received was from a solider too, but back in the beginning of the boxes,  about 5 or 6 years ago.  I still send postcards to my grandsons ,when we go anywhere, so that they will gave mail.  Occasionally I'll send something to them in their own envelope so they can still feel the excitement of "What's in it".    Think I better go do that right now.

My Identity Crisis

I have been trying to find the "perfect" pictures to add to a header for this baby boomer blog.  Also, I want to have something that will display with my comments as well.  It's not an easy thing deciding what  do I want to represent.   We boomers are so many things.  We've covered a lot of decades and I've got the hairstyles to prove it.

From my young adult years, ages 17 - 26,  this is what I'm finding.  This is what happens when you invest 9 years in a bad High School  relationship that turned into a bad first marriage and your dear, sweet Mother, (I can't say hated, she was too nice) but, really, really disliked that said person.

I have to laugh.   She had no control over my situation, but she sure could wield a pair of scissors with the best of them.  I know she got great satisfaction out of  snipping out that bit of rubbish.  So among the albums, I come across a piece of a picture here and there.... little snippets of myself.

I'm still looking and deciding what feels right.  In the  meantime, thought I would share a piece of myself, thanks to Mom.  We laughed about it when she was still here.  She would appreciate knowing I still get a kick out of this. 

How 1950s are those curtains? I think there are pictures of them in 2 other houses!  This was early 1970 too. Those curtains stayed there until my sister bought her new ones.

I Think I Fixed It.

Hallelujah!  I changed a setting for comments to have the pop up window.  That seems to have worked.  Such an easy thing for most people took me 4 days to figure out.  I never did like story problems and this seemed to take on that life.  If you start with X and end with 0, then what's the answer? Anything with more than 2 steps, I'm lost.  No, no, no....That gives me a headache.  Hopefully it's good and I can get all the comments.  We all know it's nice to get a little feedback once in awhile. 

I'm making these "hope it works" posts short so I thought I would share one of my favorite photos of my middle child with one of my LARC  friend's daughter. We were pregnant at the same time at the same office.

Mine is the short one and now she is taller than the blond.  Aren't they just precious when we can dress them?
I still try but I am not as successful as in the past.  All of my girls learned from my mother, that the more you try on, the more we buy.  We won't talk about the hair styles I thought looked good on them.  ( The perms were cute.  I don't understand the objections.)

Some Things I've Learned

I am sometimes surprised at how my mind works.  Not necessarily in a good or bad way, but jumping from one thing to another.   Daughter #1 was telling me about an on-line friend of hers that has written 3 books.  Her name is Ellen Meister and the latest book  that Daughter #1 was reading is called, "The Other Life", about the direction a woman's life would have taken had she made a different decision when that fork in the road presented it's self.   Who hasn't thought that.  What if...???  I think we all would keep things the way they turned out because of children, or husbands, or any other circumstance that would have been affected.  I know I would have saved myself a lot of pain had I done things differently, but, I have a wonderful family now that I would still want, in spite of all the bad stuff.  It is like the Garth Brooks song, "The Dance". 

But, along the way there are a few things I've learned.

1.  You can never hold a baby too much.  You can never get enough of the sweet smell of that little neck and enough kisses on those little toes.  You only have months to get enough to last you a lifetime.  Then it's gone.

2.  Play dirt is the best dirt.  I loved seeing my daughters dirty from head to foot in the summer.  It was fun dirt.  Clothes and sticky fingers wash.

3.  The next time you have a family holiday "get together", take a minute to just stop and watch.  Give yourself the gift of that memory.  When our family lost my  Mother, 4  1/2 years ago, those big family gatherings stopped.  Adult children moved out of state or had commitments with their families and in-laws.  I didn't realize how precious those gatherings were.  I was too busy serving and being the hostess. I wish I had savored the moments.

4.  Remember your last first kiss.   That one I do remember.  It was nearly 30 years ago and I knew it was special then.

5.  Tell the woman in the mirror that she is beautiful.   She will never be younger, have less wrinkles, or need your love less.  I've been very critical of that woman in the mirror and I should have been much kinder.  I wish I had realized this years ago. I am still working on it.

6. Children do not come with instructions.  There is not a handbook on  husbands or wives.  Parents don't have all the answers.  We are all a work in progress.

7.  There are not enough hugs.....

8.  Bleacher butt is worth it.

If you've ever read this blog, you know I love music. This is one song that touches my heart, partly because my daughters have a similiar age differnce as well.

Please Share

My mother never showed me these pictures.  After we lost her, 4 years ago, my sister and I found them while we were going through her papers.  And....being a genealogist, there were a lot of papers.  She would go on and on about great great Grandpa Easter's third cousin, twice removed, etc,.etc, but she didn't show us these.  I wish she would have.

These were taken in 1947.  She was 17.  At 18 she was married. She moved from Missouri to Michigan as a teenage bride, leaving all she had ever known.  3 weeks after her 20th birthday, she had me.  She never talked about her teenage life much.  I know she didn't date.  She worked, selling tickets, at a movie theater and that's where she met my father.  Life with him was rather trying.   For the last 30 years of her life she suffered the agonies of Fibromyalgia.  But right here......there is hope, joy and a warm summer day.   She is every bit a pretty as the other pin ups of the 1940s.  I don't think she knew that.  I wish I could have told her.

During my teenage years, she would join me and my girlfriends that had spent the night.  She would sit on the bed with us, asking all about our dates, boyfriends, dances, movies, etc.  She enjoyed hearing about them as much as we did going.  We never thought she was invading "our space".  Years later, the girlfriends would remember how she did that and how they enjoyed it too.  My sister and I did so much more, socially, than she did.  Homecoming Dances, majorette, proms and more proms, homecoming court and bridemaids.  I know it brought her joy.

I would swear there is nothing left to share with my daughters.  I've been told TMI Mom.  TMI..  My youngest daughter asks the questions.  Any questions about my past.  I always give her an answer.  She said she knows I will tell her to mind her own business if I don't want to talk about a certain subject, but I am pretty open and have not found that subject yet.  Maybe I didn't ask my mother the right questions or just maybe, she didn't feel as comfortable discussing herself.  It was a different generation.  You know us boomers...  We let it all hang out.