Thanks Mom...

For some unknown reason I have trouble remembering the date my mother departed this planet.  I often resort to getting out the memorial card from her funeral that is stashed in a cubby of my roll top desk.   I also am stumped for a logical explanation for my few musings about our relationship.  She was a great mother and of course I loved her.  Maybe it's because she was always there and unfailingly helpful in seeing me through my formative years, especially the teens, when dad wanted to kill me.  I can't begin to count the number of times she would meet him in the garage to soften him up before hitting him with my or my brother's latest shenanigans.  Don't get me wrong, he was a good father who merely wanted to keep his sons from the natural male inclination for boneheaded choices designed to put us on the fast track to prison.

With Mother's Day approaching I have begun to recall some of the times she went to bat for me.  When I was in kindergarten I developed the habit of fleeing  school whenever the teacher let the class out for recess.  I would head for the school playground with the other kids, then with a quick look over my shoulder would cut through the teachers parking lot and make my escape.  Our house was only a few blocks from school but my getaway required me to cross a city street and cut through a park before dashing across U.S. 127 to get to my hideout behind our garage.  My plan was weak in that telling time was not yet in my skill set thus requiring me to show up at our front door only when I thought school was out.  My plan worked flawlessly for a couple of weeks until one day our class was sent to recess almost immediately after roll had been taken.  The teacher was a major dingbat and had wanted the time to get herself organized for the day.  (The fact that for a little over two weeks she had failed to notice that I never returned from recess speaks volumes.)  I showed up at home before my dad had even left for work.  Busted!  Luckily mom was there to calm the situation.  After sending dad on his way to work she returned me to school where we met with the principal and succeeded in getting me placed in an afternoon class with a teacher who invariably conducted a post recess count.  Nice save mom!

There were to be many scrapes and broken rules on my way to being 18 and mom was always there to cool down the situation.  Her work was solid unless I had done something so horrific that she began to cry when trying to defuse the situation.  If the damn broke I knew dad's belt was coming off and my ass would soon be warm.  Dad would always preface my tanning with "You made your mother cry!  Shame on you!"  Of course he knew that he was in for a zero fun evening when the tears came and, after a hard days work,  there was a little extra zip in his spanking delivery.  Breaking windows with my pal Phil Brown, getting caught with smokes, cutting clothes lines with my new knife, sneaking the car keys to drive the car when I was eight and sampling dad's whiskey were just a few highlights in my body of work when mom failed to save me.  All of this before age 13! Nonetheless, she tried.   She would always tell me post spankings that my dad was really a nice guy and that I should talk to him more and try to get to know him.  Of course she was right but I remained pig-headed until I became a father myself.  At that point I wanted to give him a medal.

Mom has been gone now for nearly seven years.  She died just a couple of weeks shy of her 90th birthday and, sadly, because of dementia, was not really herself at the end.  I think of her frequently and she has even begun to make a few cameos in my dreams, always wearing the green dress I thought so beautiful when I was small.  She was a wonderful mom who no doubt deserved  more well behaved sons.  I hope she's been busy softening up dad for me.  My brother is on his own.