Day: February 6, 2019

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It Appears They Liked Each Other

Bow Tie o’ the Day has its Valentine’s Day targets ready for Cupid’s arrows. Be on the look-out for a near-naked, winged baby armed with a bow and arrows.

When I first saw the picture with visible faces, I wondered who the heck Dad was hugging. It didn’t look like Mom to me, so I got my magnifying glass out. I discovered that it really was Mom. The shadows across her face were just weird. Whew! I was worried for a millisecond. Not!

Anyhoo… Something you might not know about Mom is that she is disgusted that people wear un-ironed clothing– particularly to church. She and Peggy Crane spouted off about the general lack of ironing on the planet a bazillion times while I drove them across the county on their daily drinking rides.

Mom and Peggy even threatened to put an ad in THE CHRONICLE, offering to teach people how to iron. FOR FREE! But they decided that wouldn’t do any good since, according to them, no one knows what an iron is. (Oh, my! What a wrinkly world we live in.)

One morning in their Senior year, Dad didn’t show up at school. Mom had no idea where he was or if he was sick. (Remember: no cell phones in 1948.) Later in the afternoon, Dad showed up in a class they had together. Mom quizzed him on his earlier whereabouts and he told her he had been doing an extra job for somebody, to earn some extra cash. And then he handed her the few dollars he had earned that morning. She asked what the money was for, and he said, “Well, if we’re going to get married, we’re going to need an iron.”

Based on all the stories Mom and Dad told me over the years about their courtship, that anecdote is the closest thing to a marriage proposal I ever heard about.

So Mom bought an iron, and 71 years later she still has it. Last I heard, it still worked.

I’m sure I’m reading far too much into this, but I think the sweet “iron proposal” is responsible for Mom’s enduring attachment to the importance of ironing. That would explain Mom’s pet peeve about ironing. I don’t know why ironing mattered so much to Peggy though– unless Grant proposed to her the same way.

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Mom’s A Looker

When I was gathering my Valentine’s Day ties and bow ties to use in my posts, I hadn’t planned to create so many posts about Mom and Dad. But I’m finding it to be quite fun, and y’all seem to be liking the pix and stories about their love affair too. Thus, I’ll put aside some of the other Valentine-y ideas I intended to present, and the neckwear and I will show and tell a few more snippets about my parents.

Tie o’ the Day is content to hang in the background, while Mom stars in this morning’s pix. These are evidence of Mom’s alluring ways. Dad was born into a beekeeping family, and bees were his thing. He was crazy for bees from the minute he could toddle. Based on that fact, I have no doubt Dad thought the photo of Mom dressed up in beekeeper attire was the sexiest of these two pictures. Mom does have nice legs though.

I posted the following story about Mom and Dad a couple of years ago, but I’ll tell it again for those who might have missed it:

Dad’s family lived in Delta. Mom was from Oak City, where the kids went to school until high school, when the Oak City-ites finally rode the bus to Delta High School every day. Mom and Dad didn’t know each other until that came to pass.

But they had sort of met once before high school. Dad and his pals were at the swimming pool at the same time Mom was there with her friends. (I think it was the Oak City pool.) Mom was standing by the edge of the pool when Dad walked by and pushed her in.

Mom was ticked, turned to her gal pals, and said, “Ignernt Delta boys!”

Dad smiled, turned to his friends, and said, “I’m gonna marry that girl.”

And he did. And she wasn’t even a bee.