Happy Mother's Day!

As a little boy, I thought my mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. 

She looked like Grace Kelly to me, which made sense given the fact that dad looked a lot like Prince Rainier.

A housewife, as most mothers were in those days, mom reigned over four of us kids, a big house, her gardens, and the family dog. Always a dog at our place. Dad was especially crazy about them. We all were.

Heavily involved in charity work, she was also a “Choir Mom” during the ten years that I sang in the at St Paul’s Episcopal. It was the job of one or two moms to help the guys properly dress in our cassocks and cottas before each service. Not so easy getting a bunch of squirming little boys to look presentable, all at the same time. A bit like herding cats.

Mom worked dedicatedly every weekday morning on two things; drawing house plans on graph paper and studying the Wall Street Journal and similar stock market periodicals. She designed and built their last three houses and bought her own cars along the way with profits from her stock portfolio. Dad always made a great living as an attorney, that wasn’t the point. Mom wanted to do her own thing financially, and did.

An artist dressed like June Cleaver with her dress and pearls, mom was a master gardener with a very green thumb. On family vacations to Mexico, we all took art classes at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel.  She excelled in all of it: silver work, leather craft, watercolor, and sculpture. She continued with her leather craft for many years, stamping intricate patterns into wet leather belts and handbags that she hand cut and shaped from broad pieces of stiff tanned hide.

In later years, it was her photography that won her multiple awards.

She and dad were married for 59 years before he passed. After five years, Mom went on to a second marriage, calling me up one day to ask for my blessing to remarry when she was 86 “to an older man” she told me sheepishly.

Those two had a ball, four years of hand holding around the world. Thermal pools in Antarctica, a rubber raft to the Galapagos Islands…

She lived to be 93, leading by example with her active, literate, artistic, well-traveled, accomplished life.

Me? I thought she was beautiful.

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One of the last times I saw her, we went to dinner in the main dining room at her senior care facility. A nice place, men were required to wear a tie and jacket at dinner; the ladies wore dresses.

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 Buttons on Your Robe…

Let me help you with that, the buttons on your robe,

And guide you to the safety of a chair.

We’ll go down to the dining room and make a grand entrance,

All eyes on us as we move together in slow motion.

Your hand in mine; let me lead the way.

Sharing time with you is priceless; there is nothing I want more.

And if your unsure hand should stall and drop a bite of dinner in your lap,

You care, I know you care, but I don’t care at all.

I’ll just smile and love you.

Sixty years ago you taught me how to button my clothes.

You helped me into my chair.

If food fell from my dimpled hands, you just smiled and loved me.

And I felt safe with you.

All too soon my hands will shake like yours do now.

My girls can help me with the buttons on my robe.

I’ll think of you, and feel safe, going forward in slow motion,

Your hand in mine, showing me the way.

hmh