Don’t Ever Forget to Remember Your Raising

It was the end of the trail for me. 

Until my mother came to my rescue.

I had run out of money to put into the coin-operated horse ride outside the store. She found some in the bottom of her purse where coins seemed to reproduce.

Hannah Senesh was a three P person.

No, she didn’t letter in basketball, tennis and volleyball at Purdue. She was a poet, a playwright and a paratrooper. She wrote the lovely words, “There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for humankind.”

There have been good folks in your life who have brightened your gray days. Memories may recede like the tide, but they leave an imprint.

“How are you?” I used as a greeting. 

“I’m fine,” she said.

“How are you really?” I asked. 

“I’m fine.” That made my mother refined. She lived her last days in a care center. Each day, I’d buy her two glazed donuts. She enjoyed finger food as age had left her with little vision other than peripheral. Each day, I’d bring two more doughnuts. I thought she was eating both. A nurse in the facility told me Mom ate one and gave the other to another resident. I kept bringing two.

My mother had her Momisms. All Moms do. They’re taught them in Mom School.

Old Man Can’t was lost in a cornfield.

Just because you could doesn’t mean you should.

Not everyone needs everything.

We don’t get what we want, but we don’t get what we deserve either.

How do you know you won’t like it if you don’t try it?

That’s too good to use.

It’s medicine. It’s supposed to taste bad.

A little dirt never hurt. 

Hotpoint hotdishes. (Mom gathered leftovers from the refrigerator and produced Hotpoint hotdishes.)

If our family didn’t have so many tall people, I wouldn’t need to clean the top of the refrigerator.

Clean your plate. Think of those starving children in China. As an addendum to this instruction, I’ll add that if I cleaned my plate, I got more food. Her baked goods were baked greats. Mother taught me that gravy covers a multitude of sins and to never complain about food because you never know what’s cooking tomorrow. 

Never cuss or smile at anyone who does. 

I took Mom to the movies. It was hard to find a film I felt comfortable sharing a big screen with her. Most movies used words that were verboten in our home. At home, she had her show. She could watch it while talking on the phone. We had a telephone in every room as long as every room was the living room. Her show was “As the World Turns,” a TV soap opera that aired on CBS for 54 years. Set in the fictional town of Oakdale, Ill., it placed professionals – doctors, lawyers and clergy – at the center of its storylines. Its epigraph was, “As the world turns, we know the bleakness of winter, the promise of spring, the fullness of summer, and the harvest of autumn – the cycle of life is complete.”

The novelist Honore de Balzac wrote, “The heart of a mother is a deep abyss, at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.”

All but two of the 10 Commandments tell us what we shouldn’t do. One that doesn’t, tells us to honor our fathers and mothers.

“Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” I heard that often when I was a boy, but I didn’t believe it. It was nonsense, but I loved my mother and tried to avoid stepping on any cracks. 

There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t miss her. William Arthur Ward wrote, “A cloudy day is no match for a sunny disposition.”

I hope you have or had someone like her in your life. 

Some stars, no longer burning, continue to send their light. 

There are days, too many of them, when I think aloud, “Why can’t the world be more like my mother?”

I remain hopeful.