Mom

My mother would have been 101 today. Mom was my hero. I would like to be just like her.

Today I have been thinking about how she could make us laugh. She usually didn’t mean to be funny, she just was. Before she and dad married she decided to buy him a pedestal ashtray to sit beside his easy chair. He opened the gift at her house and said he would just leave it there and use it at her house. “But, William, I wanted you to take it home and have it there” He said he didn’t think his mother would allow it in the house. He asked if she had really looked at the pedestal. She looked more closely at it and discovered the pedestal was a provocatively posed nude. She blushed and admitted she had not noticed the naked woman. One year she gave my dad several pair of cute socks for Christmas. They were decorated with cute smiling pigs and the initials MCP. “Mom, do you know what those initials stand for?” Her response was, “What initials?” she had given dad socks indicating he was a male chauvinist pig. She was again embarrassed. Another time she made a chicken casserole for a big family dinner. It looked great! Then we tasted it and found it was not edible. “Mom, what did you put in this? It is too hot to eat.” She said the recipe called for two cans of green chili peppers, weren’t jalapeno peppers the same thing? Whenever mom got caught in a mistake she would laugh and make it into a wonderful moment for all of us. Life was too precious to get upset by the mistakes she or any one else made. Her laughter was infectious and covered a multitude of life’s problems.

Happy Birthday, Mom!