Month: September 2020

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Mom Doesn’t Look A Day Over 89

Mom had a stupendous time on her 90th birthday, even in the midst of a pandemic. She dressed up in her Sunday best. She had her earrings clipped on. Her phone was all charged up and ready for birthday callers. All five of her kids sat outside the MCR hall window, taking turns talking to her by phone on the outside side of the glass. We siblings set up socially distanced lawn chairs, and chatted and laughed with each other while Mom watched us intently through the window. I know it is always a gift for Mom to watch us enjoy ourselves sibling-ing together, being happy to be her kids. By the time we got around to taking a picture of us “with” Mom, two of my siblings were nowhere to be found. I am joined here in one photo by BT/Mercedes and Ron—and Mom, who’s proudly displaying her birthday cake. Bow Tie o’ the Day is covered in joyous emojis, and I am pleased to say my Batman socks—with their tiny capes—were a hit with Mom (and everyone else). She said she liked them before I’d even had a chance to purposely show them off to her. She’s ancient, but she notices all the important details in life.

Bigly thanks to my Sister Who Wishes To Remain Nameless for arranging for birthday decorations and posters to be set up inside MCR, and for having a celebratory cake made for Mom and “smuggled” in. My SWWTRN also decorated right outside Mom’s window, so the first thing Mom saw when she looked outside that morning was a display of balloons and words telling her she had, indeed, made it to 90. Kathi and Robbie’s family made posters they then plastered onto MCR’s windows for Mom and the rest of the residents to enjoy.

Mom has been receiving a steady stream of flowers, cookies, gifts, window visits, and phone calls over the past few weeks. And, of course, she has been receiving cards galore! I asked Mom if she knows how many birthday cards she’s received over the past couple of weeks, and she lifted up a handful of unopened cards she had gotten in the mail that very day. There were at least a dozen unopened envelopes in her hand. She says she has not counted all the cards and letters yet, but that she knows “there are a lot.” I can say from taking a glance through the window into her room that piles of cards dot every flat surface. I know how my mother is, and I know darn well she will read and re-read her birthday cards from now until she’s 91, and beyond. They will provide her much joy and nostalgia, especially in the absence of in-person visits. Thanks, y’all!

To all of you who sent birthday greetings to Mom in any form, I and my siblings—and Mom—are grateful for your love for her. She feels rightly adored and spoiled. You helped to make Mom’s Pandemic 90th Birthday a many-people-involved, grand occasion for her.

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Mom Says “Boo” About Her 90th, Occurring On The ‘Morrow

This photo of Mom and my candy corn Bow Tie o’ Last October is a fitting tribute to the almost 90-year-old gal who is my mother, since she will be the first to tell you she is proud to be a witch. Every Halloween season, Dad reminded her to sharpen her broom, and she would assure him she had already done it, so he better straighten up.

I won’t be posting tomorrow, on Mom’s actual birthday, because I will be busy waving Merry Birthday to her through the Millard Care and Rehab windows. We plan to spend the day with her—masked and socially distanced from any others there to celebrate Mom’s milestone with her. Skitter has already picked out the Tie o’ the Day she’s going to be wearing for Mom to see.

I’ll shoot pix and take notes of the socially distanced, non-gathering gathering. I hope I can snap lots of photos of Mom in action, on the other side of the glass. Also, I’ll try to get a birthday card count. Y’all have sent Mom a boatload of cards and notes and even gifts. I thank you for playing a bigly part in Mom’s Contactless Pandemic 90th Birthday. I’ll blow Mom a kiss through the window, from y’all.

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Goodbye, Pandemic Hairs Thursday’s: Before And After The Cut

I was so busy posting about Mom last week that I skipped right over Pandemic Hairs Thursday. Mom’s much more interesting than my hairs could ever be anyway, so I’m sure nobody missed seeing my ‘do last week. Hey, my pandemic hairs were fun for the most part, but I couldn’t take them anymore. My hairs felt like they weighed a ton on one side of my head. Trying to hold up my head straight was causing me severe neck pain. Beyond that, I decided it would be respectful of me to show up looking well-kempt for Mom, outside MCR’s windows Saturday when I can wave at her on her 90th Birthday.

I finally got in touch with Miss Tiffany o’ Great Clips and she was able to fit me into her schedule this morning. My hairs haven’t seen her since February, before Suzanne and I went on vacation to Nashville. I have to admit I ended up feeling bigly bad to have enlisted Miss Tiffany to cut my hairs today, however. She was glad to see me and my birdies wood Bow Tie o’ the Day, but she was hobbled by a broken foot. Apparently, she broke it in a dancing accident in Wyoming. She had attended a wedding reception there last weekend, where she was dancing around while wearing extra-high heels. Miss Tiffany’s family kept admonishing her to take off the extra-high heels while dancing, or she was bound to fall. She finally got sufficiently irritated at her family harping on her about her extra-high heels that she shed them and put on some flats. She hit the dance floor again in “safer” shoes, at which time she promptly slipped on the dance floor in her flats, ripping up the tendons in her foot. She said her foot dangled from her leg all the way home from Wyoming. I asked her if it dangled like a participle. She wasn’t sure.

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One Of Mom’s Surprises For Me

In the late 70’s, when I was in high school, Mom had this swell idea to completely redecorate a bedroom for me. Mom did all the work herself. New paint, new carpet (lime green!!!), new walltex. The walltex had been a problem. I was not agreeing to any of the scads of samples she showed me. They were girly, and cutesy, and otherwise uninteresting to me. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful for what Mom was trying to do, but I was not pleased with the choices she presented me. I was ready to throw in the towel and just pretend to really, really, really like whatever she showed me next—so she could get the project underway and git ‘er done. And then Mom brought me a sample of the walltex you see here, with its rustic farmhouse vibe. Call me Holly Hobbie, but I immediately agreed to it from the very insides of my innards. I liked it bigly time.Mom liked it so well, she left it on the walls for years. A couple of decades later, when I was long gone from my childhood home, Mom redecorated the bedroom once again. On my next birthday or Christmas (I forget which occasion it was), I opened up the present from Mom to find this strip of my high school walltex in a custom-built wood frame, ready for hanging on the wall as a picture. She remembered all those years how hard we had struggled to find a walltex design I would be happy about living with. It was a sweet surprise for me to receive this old piece of walltex so many years later. It’s another of Mom’s skills: Mom knows how to pull off the Grand Gesture when giving a gift, even if it is simply a piece of used wallpaper.

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Mush On The Porch

Yup, that’s all this is: Mom eating her oatmeal mush on my front porch one morning. (FYI Mom puts Half & Half on her mush.) Mom was not being shy for the camera here. She was laughing so hard at something I said that she was on the verge of spitting her mush, and I wanted to capture it on film if it happened. Oh, how I wish I could remember what I said that caused her such a laughing fit, cuz I would certainly write it down here for y’all to read—at the risk of causing you to spit your own mush.

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Mom And Her Food

Here’s a dusty photo of Mom and her earrings in her family room in 2005, where we threw a little 75th Birthday open house for her. It was a word-of-mouth, mostly family event. Mom didn’t want anything too big, because she was setting her pace to make it to her 80th Birthday bash. And magically—she’s now on the cusp of 90.

That’s Dad behind her, eating whatever it was she made for her 75th B-day open house. Yes, she catered her own birthday party. She didn’t want it any other way. Mom is an excellent cook. It is her talent, and she knows it. She has always liked to see people enjoy her food. When we were preparing for her 80th Birthday bash, we told her she was not allowed to cook for the occasion—not because she wasn’t fully capable of doing it, but for the simple fact that we didn’t want her to work that hard. In the notice we put in THE CHRONICLE to invite folks to Mom’s 80th, we even announced that Mom would not be cooking for the occasion—hoping that just such a public proclamation would further encourage Mom not to attempt to cook something for the whole town. Oh, how naive we were!

Mom showed up at her own 80th Birthday shindig with trays of wrapped homemade toffee and baked popcorn galore—and little jars of jam—for everyone who showed up to see her be old. I immediately gave her the sarcastic raised eyebrow and Evil Eye stare. During the party, she said to me, “You kids aren’t mad at me for making treats, are you? I just wanted to give everybody a goodie.” I told her to relax. I said, “Mom, we always get over you not minding us. Get over it yourself.” And then we winked at each other, and off she went to hand out more treats. I will tell you now that she felt guilty she ran out of her creations before all the people quit coming through the door to bid her a happy 80th. She told me the next day that she was going to try to remember every single person who came but didn’t get a goodie, so she could make more and deliver the offerings in person. I was sore afraid! Could we pump that much gas into the Helenmobile?

So what did Mom do? She quickly figured out that her plan to see that every last person who attended her 80th got homemade, Helen-created treats was not feasible. She let go of her guilt, and let it slide. She went back to worrying that her children were mad at her for cooking when we had already taken care of refreshments for the open house. In the thank-you-to-everyone-who-came-to-my-party note she put in THE CHRONICLE the next week, she half-heartedly apologized to us for not listening about not cooking for her own bash—for yet again doing whatever the HELL-en Wright she wants to do. I called her and told her once more, “Mom, we always get over you not minding us. Get over it yourself.” And then she said, in her best theatrical, smart-mouth tone, “Well, what do you expect? You kids never listened to me all those years you were growing up!” Point taken. Game, set, match! Mom wins!

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The Anderson Girls

Here’s a picture of Mom and her sisters, and their mom, Martha Anderson. [Grandma is front and center. From left to right: Shirley, Arlene, Rosalie, Barbara, Mom.] This photo was taken at the Hotel Utah in the early 70’s, where these lasses would occasionally get together for a mother-daughters sleepover for a night or two—away from the hubbies and wild kids, and away from having to cook and clean. I can only imagine the cackle-fest which ensued when they took over the hotel.

You can see from the photo that by that time, Grandma had already lost her right eye. At first, she wore a glass eye in public. She wasn’t vain. She simply did not want to scare children. However, the prosthesis bothered her bigly, so she finally quit wearing it completely. (But not before she dropped it in my car once while I was driving her to the Provo temple, and it rolled around on the floor mats as I drove, cuz we were running late and Grandma wouldn’t let me stop the car until we got to the temple. Oooo, that’s a story I need to write about for y’all. ) Grandma preferred to cover the right lens of her glasses so no one could see her eyeless eye. It wept constantly.

The second photo shows a perfect example of Mom’s cleverness. This is a pic of the cake Mom commissioned Marcia Meacham to create for Grandma’s 90th Birthday party at the old Delta care center. The cake captures Grandma’s quiltiness. And I so like the tiny ears of corn dotting some of the “quilt” squares. But the best cake detail is the covered right lens on Grandma’s glasses. Grandma—and the rest of the partygoers—got a true kick out of it.

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Merry Birthday To My Bigliest Sister!

When I lived in the Washington, D.C.-area, I wanted Dad to come see the sights. Knowing my parents as I do, I knew they didn’t like to both be away from their bee ranch at the same time, so Dad needed a travel pal to fly across the country with him. My sister, BT, to the rescue! She’s adventurous. Mercedes, as I usually refer to her, has never seen a tombstone, monument, or museum she didn’t have to check out. Add Dad to the equation and she was all in for the trip. Here are pix I snapped of them at the Lincoln Memorial and at Harpers’ Ferry, W VA. (Yes, it is on this trip when people who saw Dad walking in D. C. honked their horns and/or asked for his “Sean Connery” autograph.)

Today, TIE O’ THE DAY wishes the merriest of birthdays to BT, my first-born sibling! BT is yet another “porch worthy” icon in my life. This morning I wrote about imagining Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Mom lighting up my old Delta porch with scintillating conversation, and I want y’all to know that the “porch worthy” BT, my Mercedes, would be sitting right there—laughing with us all, way too loudly for the neighborhood to handle without checking on us to make sure we old ladies were not in any danger of a medical emergency.

BT and I are the oldest and youngest of the family, 15 years apart in age—near-matching bookends to our siblings. We look alike, especially in our school pictures. We share a love of not just reading books, but of studying them. It’s like neither one of us ever left school. I don’t know what we’re studying for, but I can guarantee that if you give either of us a pop quiz on just about anything relating to history, social sciences, and the humanities, we would probably both pass—especially if we did the quiz together. We are both interested in almost any topic.

BT and I are on similar wavelengths in terms of public policy and the importance of including the word “responsibilities” whenever we talk about the word “rights.” We share a whole-hearted belief in Mosiah 2:17, about the importance of serving our fellow beings. And we do not tolerate bullying, in any forum. To us, meanness has no place in any context where human beings gather to learn, work, or worship. We stand against the whole of that sort of unnecessary contention, even when it sometimes feels as if we two are standing alone.

We have similar minor pet peeves. We most certainly get agitated when people who should know better don’t spell and use words correctly and appropriately. In fact, we are both slightly—but proudly—snotty about clear language usage. BT and I would both be embarrassed to be caught somewhere with our grammar down around our ankles, so to speak.

I could go on. I could give you a million ways we mirror each other, and I could give you a million ways we don’t. Suffice it to say that I find my Mercedes to be interestingly different from me. I hope I am the same to her. I would hate to be BORINGLY different from her.

Love and peace to you on your birthday, my Sister Who Lets Me Name Her in my tblog.

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R.I.P., Notorious R.B.G.

During a week in which we’re celebrating Mom in the homestretch to 90, we bid farewell to another larger-than-life old dame. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg did nothing less than make this country a more equitable place, long before she was appointed to the Supreme Court. Her brilliant legal mind; her clarity of expression; her late-in-life rock star presence; her commitment to family and country; her straight-man sense of humor—all of these things earn her the highest honor I can bestow. I declare RBG to be “porch worthy.” Yes, I can imagine Mom and I on my Delta front porch, inviting RBG to join us for a beverage. I can see exactly how it would have played out: I would make the introductions, and after about 5 minutes it would be all about Mom and RBG solving problems and saving the world. And bragging about their grandkids. Laughter would abound.

There better be porches in Heaven.