Monday Musings: May 10, 2010
Sunday, May 9, 2010 at 14:43 Today is my mother’s birthday. She’s 93 years old. That’s damned old by anybody’s standards. She still drives around town, does her own ‘thing’, and can’t go 15 minutes without informing all that she won’t live to see another week, not to mention another year.
“Momma lived to be 96, but I don’t think I’m going to get there.”
While having the big whipped cream covered waffle at Heide’s restaurant in southwest Reno, yesterday - Mother’s Day - (more about Heide’s later) she regaled us again with stories of back in the day. Actually, some of them are pretty good.
On going to school for the first time: “the local school teacher used to drive by our gate with her horse and buggy. I couldn’t have been more than about four, and would run out and wave and tell her hello. She would stop and talk. Finally, one day, she asked Momma if I could go to school with her, and Momma told her sure. It was about a month later when the school board found out and said I was too young to be in school. They called us in. The school teacher gave me a book to read in front of them. They never said any more, and I continued in school.”
This is Mom’s explanation for my supposdedly being able to ‘read’ at age two. Highly unlikely, but it entertaining.
On having black friends: “we only had a few black kids in school, and they had to sit in the back of the room, in the corner. They never said anything, and the teacher never asked them anything. I felt sorry for them.” … (seque to Miami, Florida in the 1950’s when I was little) … “Then there was that day I was sitting in our kitchen having coffee with that black woman who came in to do the ironing. That neighbor whose husband was in the Klan, let’s herself in the back door with a fresh pie in her hands. She looked at me and the black woman, and without saying a word, turned and went out the door and never came back.”
My mother may have been raised in Kansas, but never, ever had time or patience for racism or bigotry. Her worldview, aside from that, is pretty limited - in large part from being raised in the worst of the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. She never, ever got past it. Having a job, money, and eating whatever was in front of you, was more important than anything else - including any possible joy.
It’s a bleak worldview for the most part, but it’s got her this far. And, remember, she won’t last another week. She still can’t imagine what makes her feel so tired and achey these days. She thinks it has to be fibro-myalgia. I tell her it’s possibly “93-myalgia”.
She says I’m not funny.
