Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in. We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.
Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools un-suffered. We’re here every Sunday at 7 pm.
Happy Mother’s Day!
Tonight let’s talk about Moms and all the mom-adjacent people in our lives and the impact they had on you related to all things culture.
My mom took us to plays, took us to the Art Institute and all the other museums in Chicago, took us to the ballet, played music of all sorts all the time. She took us to nice restaurants in downtown Chicago after going to a museum or when we downtown to see the Christmas decorations in all the stores, and going out to dinner at a nice neighborhood restaurant was a frequent Sunday afternoon treat.
We had a back-to-school ritual of going to Oak Park to shop for school clothes; those memories are quite vivid. And Easter! We got special Easter dresses and spring coats and hats and anklet socks and patent leather shoes and my Dad always bought his 3 girls corsages for Easter Sunday.
My mom took us to musicals, and we had soundtracks to all the Disney movies. We lived right across the street from the movie theater, so we got to see loads of matinees. In those days, we could pay to get into the theater and then you could spend all day. We would walk across the street on Saturday afternoons and didn’t even worry about what time the movies started. We would watch from whatever point the movie was at when we arrived, watch til the end, and the rewatch the whole thing. Sometimes there was even a double feature.
The library was just around the corner, and oh how we loved to read. That surely did not happen by accident. We had the whole collection of Nancy Drew mysteries, and I was so mad at my mom when she donated the whole set to the library as we got older!
How about your Mom? Maybe you even had more than one Mom! Don’t forget grandmothers, and all the mom-adjacent women in your life. A friend of mine basically had 3 moms – her mom and her two aunts, who all raised her.
Oh, and the influence doesn’t have to be positive! Maybe they made you sit through an opera when you were 7 years old, and you have hated opera ever since!
Mom-related memories, let’s go!
In case you are new to Medium Cool, these are not open threads.
SpaceUnit
Love that picture up top because my mother loved The Wizard of Oz. Pretty sure it was her favorite movie of all time. She lived in Kansas for a time during the 90’s and amassed a very nice collection of Oz paraphernalia, porcelain figurines, etc. I can recall her singing Over the Rainbow when I was a kid.
Thanks for making me remember that.
thruppence
My elementary school was two short blocks from our house. I’d walk home for lunch, Mom would make me a sandwich and read to me from Lord of the Rings. Don’t know what you got til it’s gone kinda thing.
Craig
My mum gives me enough rope to put the noose around my neck, them forcefully reminds me to take that noose from off my neck. Latch key kid, I could do what I wanted until I fucked up. When I was in HS a soccer player friend was a freshman at UVA and Psychedelic Furs were playing there. I convinced my parents that me and my girlfriend could drive the hour out there, stay overnight and get up, shower and make it to school for 8am. I think I was sincere. Needless to say I was hanging out with college freshmen. We played some game, Mexican, that I don’t remember the rules, but involved me getting wasted on cheap tequila-Pepe Lopez probably. I spent the show on the floor of a toilet stall in Memorial Gymnasium. True to my word we made it to First Period, five minutes late with my chill drama teacher. I left half way through and went home when the hangover really came on and tried napping on the couch. When I heard gravel in the driveway I knew mum had unexpectedly come home for lunch. I still remember that look on her face, cause she’d already seen my car in the driveway and was worked up by the time she came through the door. Did not go well for me. All the screaming came from love. She didn’t go back to work and helped me through my first big liquor hangover. Always reminding me I fucked up and broke my word.
Josie (also)
My Mom took us to the open air summer Robin Hood Dell Philadelphia Orchestra concerts (free then) and later car pooled with other parents to the Philadelphia Orchestra Junior Concerts where we were blown away by David Amran playing jazz flute. I remember a Saturday jazz session. We were suburban kids, so this was culture and new to us.
We also went to see the Van Gogh exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art which was very special. Lots of good memories.
Trivia Man
I dont recall her liking much in the way of the arts other than church organ music and the tabernacle choir. We went to movies because my dad loved them, she just seemed to tolerate them. I do remember her literally laughing out loud at one movie. The Bad News Bears.
Because Tatum O’Neal refused to wear a cup nobody else would either. One of the boys takes a shot to the nuts and collapses in agony. My mom the PE teacher SHRIEKED with laughter. “He’s not wearing a cup!! ha ha ha!!!”
NeenerNeener
You just reminded me….my mom had cast recordings of Broadway musicals that she listened to when we were at school. Since we came home for lunch and had staggered lunch breaks according to the grade we were in I learned most of the score to Camelot whether I understood what they were singing about or not. She was also a big fan of the Chad Mitchell Trio, so I had an early education in political snark.
TheOtherHank
When I was a wee lad my mom wanted to know if young Hank had any musical talent. (Aside: I come from a long line of Midwestern Scandinavian farmers, but we were living in San Diego at the time.) Somehow I ended up getting accordion lessons. The instructor came to our house once a week. I practiced my various tunes. From time to time (every other week, every week? I don’t remember), all the little kids taking accordion lessons would gather at some hall in old town San Diego and we’d play songs together. If you were brave you could get up in front and play a solo. After 5 solos, you were awarded a little accordion pin. I still have my pin.
I didn’t stick with the instrument, but it did set me up to appreciate Norteño music.
Trivia Man
@Trivia Man: Homer was right – football to the groin is a classic
Gloria DryGarden
@TheOtherHank: I didn’t truly appreciate accordion until living in Uruguay, acriss the river from Buenos Aires, with all than bandoneón tango music. It really grew on me.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Like Craig, Mom’s attitude was do anything until you fucked up. Single Mom, two jobs, latch-key kid. I say I was raised by wolves because I was as free ranging as you could get.
One thing it compels you to do as a kid is get away with tons of shit but in order to do so, you had to plan, and be responsible. Otherwise, it was face the Wrath of Mom which was rather rathful.
She took me to listen to bluegrass at the legendary Shamrock bar in Georgetown where she worked on weekends. I’d go on Monday or Tuesdays, a 7 year old spinning on a bar stool drinking cokes. It instilled a love not just of music but of performance and learning.
eclare
My mom was very much into Impressionist art, so much so that she volunteered with the local art museum to talk about various paintings at schools.
At the time I was in middle school, when you deny that you even have parents, and I was so embarrassed. Then a few years passed, and I acknowledged that I had parents, enough to be seen out in public with them. I can’t tell you how many times mom and I would be out running errands and some kid would come up to her and happily say “You’re the art lady!”
I know lots of people like the Impressionists, the paintings are easy to like, but I like to think I got that from her.
rekoob
Music has been at the center of most of my life, thanks to my mother. She was a Music major in college and became the (paid) Alto soloist/section leader at the nearby Episcopal church. She was also active in the local symphony chorus and other pick-up groups. As our voices developed, we kids joined in — I was in the Children’s Chorus of Hansel and Gretel, and when The Carpenters came through town, I was one of the chorus of “Sing, Sing A Song”. I started close-harmony singing groups in college and graduate school, and participated in choirs when I lived in Europe.
We went to church at my father’s family’s Southern Baptist congregation, but we were largely ecumenical in our upbringing. A highlight for us was attending The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve at King’s College Cambridge as a family in 1994.
Mom died just under five years ago. I think of her when I hear the hymns “For All The Saints” and “O, God Our Help in Ages Past”, which we played and sang at her burial.
Craig
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Nice.
Percysowner
TW:This is hard, long and depressing in spots. Feel free to skip. If I hadn’t just come back from a mother’s day with my daughter and had a bit to drink, I probably wouldn’t write this.
When I was three, my family went on vacation. I fell off a small bridge and was holding on when my mother had a spasm and kicked me, totally out of her control. Someone jumped in and saved me (obviously). Shortly after that we were told that my mom had MS. The spasm was part of her disease. I spent the next 8 years watching her become sicker and sicker, going from using canes, to a walker, to a wheel chair. The house we lived in only had a bathroom on the second floor, so we got a little box that she could pee in during the day. She had a heart attack and died when I was 11, on Christmas Day. Merry Christmas?
I remember that every Tuesday and Thursday, as long as she could walk, she went to work at the hospital. She ran the book mobile. At the time, hospital stays were longer and she brought books to people who were having a long stay. I remember her bringing me when she was looking for books for her clients. I remember a projector where the patient could put the book on and it would project the image on the ceiling, so those who could not sit up could read. I remember her coming home devastated, because she had been fired because “It was too depressing to see her struggle to do her job” (this was the early 1960s, no ADA for almost 30 years). I remember her saying that she finished every shift and hit every room and they still let her go.
I remember her going to Trick or Treat for Unicef, when I was young and before she needed her wheel chair. I remember one of my teachers calling her in to talk to her and her crying on the way home, because the teacher told me she leaned on me too much. I remember telling her my teacher was wrong and she could lean on me when she needed to. No one thought to tell my father that he should step up. My Granny (Mom’s mom) did step up, coming over to cook and clean and help, until my father got a job in another city. I rarely saw her again. She was an immigrant, old school woman who never learned how to drive and my dad didn’t have the time to to get her or take us to visit.
I remember the Christmas Eve when I finally asked my mom why my dad’s mother didn’t like her or me. She was kind to my Grandmother, explaining that Grandma never wanted my dad to marry her because her parents were immigrants (the more things seem to change, the more they stay the same), and they were from Hungary and they might be (Oh HORRORS) CATHOLIC! Did you know there is a Protestant Hungarian Reformed Evangelical Church? Well there is, and my grandparents were NOT, as my maternal Granny told me, Catholic! Mom then said that Grandma always hoped that dad would divorce her, but when I was born, Grandma knew he wouldn’t, so she hated me too. The next day, my mom died.
After she died, my dad told me that when she was first diagnosed with MS, the doctors told HIM, but told him to tell my mother that her symptoms were just the stress of having a young kid. When he told me, he also told me how angry he was at her that she DARED to be angry at him for lying to her about her illness. He did what the doctors told him, how could she not understand that he HAD to gaslight her. I agreed with her, but didn’t dare tell him, he was all I had left.
I have held onto every scrap of memory that I can dredge up on her, but I’m going to be 72 and I only had 11 years with her. 61 years later, I miss her and wish that I could have had a little more time.
I love you Mom, forever.
Edited because line breaks got funky
Gloria DryGarden
Poetry: I remember my mom reading aloud to me from her collected works of AA Milne. Not so much the Winnie the Pooh, but the poems,
“they’re changing the guard at buckingham palace, Christopher robin goes down with Alice “ and
“I would like a bit of butter to my bread”
her great sense of rhythm reading those to me, has stayed with me.
On Easter, she often sewed us matching mother_daughter dresses, then my grandmother came over and brought us new hats. In the 60s that was a thing..
Cooking: I fondly remember all the cooking lessons, growing older and learning to make puff pastry together for a recipe I wanted to make, and all the French restaurants my parents took me to for birthdays, all the family style meals at a local Chinese restaurant.
I remember one day I’d been playing in the undeveloped lot across the street and came back with a bowl full of black raspberries, no idea what to do with them, I just wanted to pick them. She said “I know what we’ll do with these”. She pulled out a mixing bowl and a pan, and some ingredients, and put together a raspberry crumble.
Frog hunt: I still visit my memory of her helping me search by flashlight for a frog one night, on a camping trip in Missouri. Every time it called its big fog horn call, we’d turn on the flashlight, try to find it among the rushes or Lily pads. Then, not finding it, stand silently in the dark, waiting. Never saw the thing. But she got how much I loved frogs.
Ballet: She took my sister and I to downtown Chicago many times, including once to see the bolshoi ballet.
TS
I grew up in Sydney in the 1950s. My Mother took us to all sorts of free concerts – I remember loving the ABC radio programs being recorded at the City Hall. She also took us to the theatre and the ballet when funds permitted. In school holidays we went to the museum, art gallery, state library, historical parks, botanic gardens & every other place where the entrance fee was minimal & the biggest cost the train fare.
Then we moved to a very small country town and it all ended. I think this damaged my Mother much more than it hurt me – our cultural learning became restricted to the radio & gramophone records – TV didn’t get to us until the 1960s. The town eventually got a library which was handy because I had read every book in the school library (being a few bookcases in a corridor).
Ruckus
My mom had a hard life, her dad died playing tennis with her when she was 18. As the oldest and with her mom, a real sweetheart but with seemingly very little education, which was not unusual given her age, born in the late 1800s, like all my grandparents, mom pretty much raised her brother and sisters.
@Trivia Man:
A lot has changed in the last 75-125 years. I’ve seen in my 75 years a massive change in so much in this country and in this world that I’m rather amazed that more people don’t have a clue how much modern life is different than then. A dramatic advancement in so much of modern life has taken place in the lifetime of people alive and reading this blog. How many of us DON’T carry our phone with us everywhere? How many even still have a landline home phone? How many have ridden in cars made in the 1940s and still in common use in the early 1950s? How many have ridden in electric buses with overhead supply cables? How many have flown in propeller driven planes? How many can say their first TV was a B&W? And had a screen smaller than most laptops. How many have ridden in a train powered by coal? A lot of how life is lived has changed massively in the lifetimes of humans alive today, some of them converse on this blog.
zhena gogolia
@Percysowner: That is so sad.
My mother story is sad too, so this isn’t a great day for me.
Gloria DryGarden
@eclare: you’ve reminded me, my mom was vastly into sewing, and painting, and later, sculpting, terra corra, and bronze cast human sculptures. Í modeled for her a few times.
I still have a few of her paintings, a beautiful purple canyon country scene, that I loved in sight, and a still life of daffodils in a vase.
Trivia Man
@Gloria DryGarden: I have a cool CD of accordion music from around the world called Planet Squuezebox. zydeco, polka, scottish reel, french cafe… and many more.
Gloria DryGarden
@zhena gogolia: I’m sorry this is a sad day for you.
Although I’ve told some very sweet happy memories, my mom was a mixed bag.
She hated little children, only liked us once we were fluent English speakers, literate, and thus clearly had become sentient beings. It was a rough foundation. And she was a very critical, judgemental lady. When I got in trouble, it was often for things I didn’t know were expected of me. I learned way later that that’s called “gotcha.” I had to do a lot of processing once I was a grown up.
There’s no way to know until one is much older, how hard parenting is. it becomes amazing that one came out alive after putting one’s parents through so much button pushing, that one had meals, and clothes, and had been chauffeured to dance classes and after school events, and etc. Just amazing.
Ruckus
@Percysowner:
I am so sorry for all your family losses. So, so many families had stories like yours, somewhat including mine. Medicine when us old farts were born was a stethoscope and a thermometer and 2 aspirin. So much has changed in medicine in the lifetimes of old farts that today it is damn amazing. But then what really hasn’t changed with better science and information?
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: The wound is too raw for me to reminisce. Hugs to you.
schrodingers_cat
@Percysowner: Thanks for sharing. {{ }} Hugs.
eclare
@Percysowner:
I’m so sorry. I wish you had had more time, too. From what you wrote, it sounds like you and she were each other’s allies in a family where you needed one.
Gloria DryGarden
@Trivia Man: god that sounds wonderful. Esp zydeco, and polka. When I went to the contra dances and tea dances, I loved to polka, often to accordion music.
There’s this composer in Europe who does little videos, playing bandoneón, or piano. Beautiful haunting lyrical stuff. Claudio Constantini.
Trivia Man
@Gloria DryGarden: Thank you for triggering a happy memory. I know my mom read to us at night, chapter books. I have known how to read as long as i can remember, probably since about age 3. She knew i could read them myself but i enjoyed the close time and she was willing to do it. She has never been particularly warm or nurturing, i suspect she is also on the spectrum.
The only book i remember her reading for sure to me was Momma’s Bank Account
WaterGirl
@Percysowner: I’m glad you have such vivid memories of your mom, even though many of them are so hard. I’m sure her love for you was as fierce as yours is for her.
Gloria DryGarden
@Percysowner: im sorry for what you went through,
and for what your mom went through, too. What a difficult loss.
I hope you grew up learning Hungarian…
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: Thanks. My mother was great. It just was a sad ending.
Kayla Rudbek
My mom loves listening to music and she played the organ when she was young. I picked up the “always want to hear music” from her. And we always had a ton of books in the house (this started with my great grandparents, I think, and carried over to my grandmother and my great aunt). Mom loves romance novels and I do as well (we both read Regency subgenre, she tends to read more contemporary, medical, and Western romance than I do; I like paranormal, historical, and time-travel romance as well). We used to go to the Paperback Exchange in Minneapolis and we had tons of credit there. Mom would get wish lists from her sisters and my grandma and send them boxes of used paperback romances. And she almost always puts at least one paperback book into every box that she sends me for holidays throughout the year, as well as the Book Pages magazine that she picks up at the library (because I love finding new books).
When we would go to the library, Mom had two rules for me: 1) I could only check out as many books as I could carry (sometimes she would help carry if the extra wasn’t too much for her) and 2) I had to pay my library fines myself out of my allowance. So I am excellent at packing a book bag (although since my county library has eliminated fines, I am now bad at returning books on time).
Trivia Man
@Ruckus: My grandfather was born about 1905 and lived in rural idaho. He vividly recalled the first automobile he saw and also lived to see the internet. It is indeed an extraordinary change.
I also ponder how radical it was from about 1850 to 1950 in very visible ways. Trains, cars, airplanes, telegraph, telephone, typewriter, television, skyscraper…
The changes from 1950 are probably more extreme – but not as obviously. We still have all those things – functionally identical on the surface but vastly more complicated and powerful.
Grumpy Old Railroader
<sigh> I’m so old I can remember playing with my Great Grandmother who was born in 1874. My Mommy is still kick’n at 97 years old and lives in a little one-bedroom apartment in a senior living facility. Her and my Dad were both living and working in Yosemite when they met and married and yeah, that was where I was conceived. Mommy still reads every day and I have to periodically resuscitate her Kindle Fire
Trivia Man
@Kayla Rudbek: mom believed in making books available. Never once recommended any or made suggestions, just bookshelves packed full and no restrictions on any. And very very rarely ever said “stop reading!”
Years later i suspect she knew i was reading til 3 am but since i was always up first in the morning she never took away the flashlight.
The encyclopedia was a blessing that i nearly read cover to cover. Many an hour lost going from one connecting subject to another. When internet surfing was coined i instantly recognized the concept.
Ruckus
@Gloria DryGarden:
Humans can adapt to a lot, good or bad. Sure often it isn’t in any way, shape or form fun, easy or interesting but that is an advantage to being a human, learning is part of the process, right after another change. And another change and another, ad infinitum. I learned to live on a ship with 350 other humans, mostly crappy food, and people telling me what to do every day, even though more often than not they didn’t have a clue.
Shana
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I have always referred to that as the era of Benign Neglect. It was kind of how I grew up, 3 one block long streets surrounded by a ravine. We knew our boundaries and listened for each family’s signal to come home for dinner, whistles, cowbells, whatever. Otherwise we were free to roam. Idyllic in retrospect.
hitchhiker
When I was born she was just 27 and had three little boys, aged 4, 3, and 2.
(She told me many times how glad she was when they said, “It’s a girl!” and I believe her.)
She also had work as an RN, because during WWII that degree was more like a two year certificate– in the realm of the possible for her. She always worked, sometimes the night shift, sometimes swing. My dad was frequently out of work.
After me came four more kids, two brothers and two sisters. After kid #5, she was drowning and she knew it. She went to her priest and asked permission to use birth control, meaning condoms. No, no, no. If God gives you kids, you say thank you.
By the time I was ten, she’d more or less given up every shred of fantasy about the family she could have. She started drinking then and kept it up until I was long gone.
I read about moms who took their kids to museums, opera, libraries, fairs, whatever. She didn’t do that. She couldn’t. She never read to me, or bought me books, or told me about things in the world … she baked fresh bread, six loaves at a time, twice a week. She went to work. She made giant pots of spaghetti sauce, and once in a while, popcorn. When I was really young, she sang — WWII songs. Bicycle Built for Two, Mairsie Doates, Que Sera. That stopped at some point.
We were never close, and also never estranged. I think she was a little afraid of me after I got old enough to be tested in school; my IQ freaked everybody in my family, long before I could understand what it was.
I got lucky in my own late 20s and landed in an alanon meeting, where 3 or 4 older women took me on and nurtured my fucked up self onto a path toward adulting. Thank you to my mom, so much, for all that work. And thank you to Rosemary, Jerri, Elise, and Claire, so much, for seeing me.
Kayla Rudbek
@Trivia Man: I loved the encyclopedia as well, and I had a Volume Library that was/is a condensed version of an encyclopedia. James Burke’s Connections tv show was Wikipedia before the internet was invented.
Craig
@Trivia Man: I’d forgotten the Encyclopedia. My mum put it in the budget. Once or twice a month we’d pick up another volume from the A&P grocery. I read it cover to cover. Thanks for the memory.
Craig
@Shana: yep. ‘The Woods’ started at the edge of my parents backyard. Be home for dinner at 5:30. Then be home by dark. ‘The Woods’ ran for miles and miles through a swamp and an old Civil War battlefield where you could still see the remains of trenches and gun batteries. Idyllic, yeah.
Gloria DryGarden
@Shana: your ravine sounds divine. You must have found wonderful things there.
I think I was saved by the undeveloped blocks or wild untended plots where I grew up. From age 6- 18, there was always something like that, within a block. Plants growing, violets, milkweeds, blackberries, trees and bushes, a giant log to sit on, a swampy pond, a semi arid mesa full of low wildflowers and small mammals, a soybean field.
I don’t think many kids have that anymore.
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I know children who could happily spin on a barstool for hours and hours. It sounds like kid heaven..
Gloria DryGarden
@hitchhiker: 8 kids in a row sounds like a lot. So hard on a mother’s body. I appreciate your description, not close, not estranged.
Your story reminds me of a play that ran a long time in Denver, called “Quilters,” about frontier women’s lives. There was a scene where a woman on her 14th pregnancy was at the doctor’s, begging him, please, for a way to terminate it, wasn’t there something he could give her. The desperation. In my great great grandmother’s time, it was the way of things, only they didn’t all live to adulthood.
I suspect motherhood used to be mostly a life of hard labor and daily chores for many, endlessly cooking, baking, cleaning. And not about connection, or family as community. So little time for dreaming, or cultivating talents.
Thank goddess for Al-anon, and The help to cultivate some sanity.
Omnes Omnibus
We had brunch with my mother today. Seeing all the stories online of people whose mothers really no longer around, I will just say that I have been very lucky to make it to my age with another parents alive and kicking.
Gloria DryGarden
@Ruckus: so true:
thanks for responding.
I think the trick is in finding mentors, and in how much resilience one has to learn and adapt. It depends some on how many adverse childhood experiences one has had, how much trauma, how much one was heard an allowed to express and explore. There are studies now about ACEs, and health outcome data related to it, very validating, and informative.
I was always comforted by a cartoon I kept, had a drawing of an old old guy, bent over his cane. The caption said, “it was hell, recalls former child”
also, the AA, and Alanon joke cartoon, “welcome members of adult children of normal parents” One person, smiling happily, in an otherwise empty auditorium.
Of course everyone’s experience varies.
Ben Cisco
Mama Cisco was an educator. My childhood was effectively split between Queens NY and RURAL Alabama. She bought successive editions of the Encyclopedia Brittanica; she claims that I learned to read at 3. She pushed for me to be allowed to watch Star Trek in its original run (thank you and rest in power Nichelle Nichols!). She made me take typing in high school and NEVER let me settle.
I am indebted to her beyond all measure, and I am indeed blessed to still have her. We spent the day together, and I am grateful.
Lyrebird
@Ben Cisco: Thanks for sharing more about Mama Cisco.
Missing my own, who was also a force for my education and the education of others.
Total respect.
Lauryn11
My mother was a diva, an actress, a singer who could do it all from Gershwin to Puccini. My father was a piano prodigy, arranger, director, they were a love match, a team, and were always performing. My family tree, as far back as we know is full of musicians, amateur and pro. Growing up we were surrounded by music, theater, and books.
Mom was no housekeeper or minder, there was a lot of chaos but a lot of love, and she gave all of us the scope to be true to our gifts, in music and all the rest. She was the fun, glamorous mom that the other kids in my school wished they had, and I wished I had appreciated how rare she was, even though I craved more stability.
Two of my siblings were special needs, and looking back, it’s a small miracle we all survived. My parents (and grandparents) were stronger than I knew. To this day, my mind is a musical catalog with space reserved for the children’s songs and lullabies my mother composed just for us.
Jim Appleton
My mom, with dementia, always tells me in our phone calls that she spends a lot of time in “the City,” San Francisco to her Berkeley. She hasn’t been there in thirty years
A couple years ago on a visit, I rented a car and took her to San Francisco.
I had a purpose. I took her to the Opera House and the bandshell in Goldengate Park, places where she took me and my sister, in the early 70s, to see the likes of Pavarotti, Domingo, Sutherland, et al., all in their prime.
I’m no opera fan today, but those experiences were formative.
On our drive, I thanked my mom. After we passed the Opera House the first time, she asked, “Did that whole Opera stuff mean anything to you?”
I answered that it did, and explained why. She was moved.
The question came up eight more times.
Rather than rolling my eyes, I was ecstatic — I get to do this again!
mvr
My mom had me and my sister late in her life – me at 38, my sister at 40. She was born in 1920 in the Netherlands to a shoemaker and midwife. She met my Dad after the war and they immigrated to Canada and then the US, nearly getting divorced along the way, but not following through on it after an ocean voyage or two.
My mom told me about the civil rights movement when I was six or so years old in 1964. In fact it was pretty constant dinner table conversation. She also told me about living under Nazi occupation in WWII at about the same age. That was not so much at the dinner table. She told her story and she told my Dad’s story. He never talked about it much. My folks took us to demonstrations later in the 1960s but mostly left us at home or at a shared babysitter. My mom got her Bachelor’s degree several years after I did. She was proud and self confident and it pained her that she did not have a credential though she regarded herself as well-educated all along.
We were close. I think I was the only person for her to talk to for a long time early on when my Dad wasn’t home and she didn’t yet work for money, though she did volunteer. I was probably party to lots of inappropriate information but it didn’t cause me any harm.
When she got Alzheimer’s and I was responsible for managing her care she eventually forgot I was her son (she introduced me to the vacuum cleaner at the memory care place as her nephew). But she knew she knew me and trusted me and that was really all I needed.
They were both excellent parents.
Ruckus
@Trivia Man:
Also built far better – because technology also exists in how to build things. For most of my life I was a mold maker. Written about it here before but when I was about 14 I machined the mold parts for a set of Barbie doll torso molds. That was an interesting growth experience….. Most of the molds we made were for home/food products, plastic milk or juice bottles, soft drink bottles, that sort of stuff. Some were for die cast aluminum parts. I did that from 13-14 to about 50 yrs old. Owned a bicycle shop for a few years. Last job I had was in a machine shop making mostly high accuracy parts. Retired from that about 4-5 years ago. In the second half of my 70s now. Getting up when I want, going to bed when I want, eating when I want. Took a 2 mile walk today. Slow, it was about 90 degrees here today.
mvr
@Percysowner: Damn. I don’t really know what to say but that moved me.
mvr
@Craig: From age 5 to age 8 we had a woods behind a field (ballfield) behind our house in NJ. Was allowed to range through it and remember box turtles and pits that we made into forts. Then to Illinois where there was a creek running through a neighbor’s yard and spending hours there every day without supervision.
Yes, the woods . . .
Craig
@Jim Appleton: thanks. I know those places. Thank you. Best to your mom.
NobodySpecial
Very late to this, but I work graveyard. Sue me.
Anyways, my favorite story about my mom involves music. In my house growing up, music was the dominion of my (never to be celebrated) father, so it was all pre-70’s country, all the time. My mother was secretly a rock and roll fan, but he was an abusive POS, so she kept that out of the crossfire.
Fast forward to several years after his passing in ’92, and she’s listening to stuff like Guns N’ Roses, Alice in Chains, and Metallica. So Metallica goes on tour with the guitarist from AIC (Layne Staley passed before this, RIP) opening. So my mom goes. So here’s this senior citizen appearing at the concert, and people are amazed that she’s there, knows what’s going on, and enjoys their stuff.
Instantly a group goes, “You need better seats, Mom!” Whisks her off in front of the soundboard and cordons everyone off just so she can see the show. Needless to say, she had a great time. My brother has a photo of all of us there – her, me, my brother, some other close friends. I need a copy, but it’s still etched in my mind.
WaterGirl
@NobodySpecial: What lovely story. Sorry about your abusive piece of shit dad.