2001-03-17 - 20:47 MST

March 17, 2001

Comparison

St. Patrick's Day comes every year with a sweet rememberance of celebrating Mom's birthday on the eighteenth of March. She was as old as the year, if she had lived on she would be 101 years old. But ever the beautiful fortythree year old lady she was in my eyes when she left for the great adventure we each must travel alone.

I feel 101 years old when I first pry my eyelids open and creak around to do the necessary and get a hot cup of coffee that Heather made when she got up.

So, with thoughts centered around Mom, I begin to wonder how she would react to the events from the days after her death up to the present day. I knew her about as well as a son who loves his Mom.

She was a very tender, loving Mom who would give me a hug and a kiss on the street after we had lunch and she went back to work, but she was a realistic, common sense woman and coped with things as they came along. She helped Dad organize a local union where they worked. That was when they both could have been fired out of hand -- with no prospects of being employable at decent work anywhere, ever. She labored and worried over raising an ornery, headstrong son -- its a wonder that she didn't tie, hobble and muzzle me during that operation. Especially the muzzle part. She managed to civilize me and saw me happily married. Had she lived she and Heather might have managed to keep me in long sleeved shirts, neckties and decent pants, shiny shoes and sports jackets. They would have bugged me like Heather does about getting haircuts, so, I proably would be getting haircuts twice as often.

There were events that occurred, like the big Denver blizzard in, I think 1946 -- the year of the first haylift by the military to help cattle survive during that time. Mom would have made the best of it, did what she could at home until she could go back to work.

She would have been overjoyed VJ day, her brother served on a mule train in Italy during the war. On his return, after a rest in Miami he was still gun shy. Some of Mom's former messenger boys (Western Union) were serving overseas and she was in touch with their Moms and would get news of them when they wrote their Moms. Some of the boys were killed and she would grieve over them.

Korea would have worried her to death. The sixties, wow, the sixties. She would have felt the whole world was coming unglued to see the actions of people then. JFK's assassination would have left her thunderstruck and with the end of the world feeling I am sure. Fighting continuing after the big war was over would have disgusted her.

The advances in medicine and science would have pleased her very much even after realizing much of the advancement came from the overheated, rushed wartime need for medical help as soon as it could be given.

To see her grandchildren and hold them in her arms, one after another and spoil them rotten would have been the supreme happiness in her life. As I grew up I saw how she loved the nieces and nephews, cuddled them and cooed at them when babies and gloried in seeing them grow and thrive. Oh, whe would have made a wonderful Grams to our kids. How they would have loved her.

Mom's Mother showed a different face to the world, the one she had to use to survive and raise two babies on her own. A grave serious woman, yet who managed to show her love in many ways, some small and some very large. She and I would argue something awful. I loved her and she me. She was not the hugging patting type like my Mom was, hell she never had the time to be.

Present day mores and styles would have amused Mom, the skeletons with skins that model clothes nowdays and cause women to go anorexic would puzzle her. She would certainly giggle at the teen boys, their display of aft cleavage and crotch dragging jeans. The obscenely dyed hair in spikes and other outrageous do's. That wouldn't be to her liking but as in other things she would go with the flow, not converted to their line of style or thinking though.

The Hippie 60's and early 70's would have bothered her as it did most rational mature adults. The relaxation on standards dealing with ethical and moral behavior would have hurt her to see the backward trend of homo-sapiens to homo-stupidus. She would have ground her teeth at the Woodstock philosophy, drugs and sexual frolics.

My Mom was not a rigid fundamentalist, conservative but could live and let live as long as she and hers were not attacked.

So, on her birthday eve, pondering, I wonder have I turned into my parents ?

I don't really think I would match up in the Comparison . . . . .

Blog