A TRIBUTE TO MY MOTHER:I Really Was Paying Attention

PART 1

Today I feel some guilt remembering that at times I would feel a sense of dread when talking to my mother on the telephone with that annoying sound in the background. That sound was the large oxygen machine – one of those older ones that turn the air in the room into oxygen. In the last months of my mother’s life, it was helping keep her alive. Her voice had become much weaker in the last several months, and that background noise made it difficult to hear her, especially over a telephone. Our conversations face-to-face were easier. Her mind was intact, even if her vocal cords were weakened.

What a treat for the both of us, our visits. Mother loved shoes, yet in her last years she couldn’t walk much at all, certainly not in stylish footwear. One of the first things about me she’d notice when I walked in her room was my shoes. Truth is, I bought shoes for myself that I was sure my mother would love to admire. That was my main criteria for shoe shopping…”Oh, Mom will love these” I would say to myself, usually aloud.





This is Mother and five of her siblings. She was expecting my oldest sister in this photo. Her youngest brother [not pictured] was an infant [circa 1946]

My mother was born the week of the Great Depression in 1929. She was the eldest of seven children and the age range between them substantial. At the time my mother married at age 16, [which was not unusual for the time] she had an infant brother and five other siblings. What was unusual for the time – at least compared to now, was her parents were divorced. Mother’s parents divorced in a time which divorce could be considered scandalous, and she felt protective of her brothers and sister. Mom was born in Alabama, but as a girl grew up [at least in part] in Brooklyn, New York. The move back to Alabama in her teens was quite a cultural clash. My mother was not racially prejudiced, and the Deep South in the 1940s was so different from where she had come. This is where is met my father.

My mother was beautiful - statuesque, with jet black hair, olive skin and hazel eyes. She had the body of a movie star. My father was a handsome man, and had done very well for himself, as they say. They married after a very brief courtship of two whole weeks, and were married for 63 years. It was rocky marriage, but there were also good times.

As she and my father started their own family, they did their share of parenting my mother’s brothers and sister. Most, if not all of, lived with us at one time or another. I just can’t imagine being 24 years old with four of your own children, and caring for as many of your siblings who required your care at any given time. She loved it, and she loved all of us.

Mother was not raised in a religious home; her parents were agnostic you might say. At the age of around 16, my mother became a Christian – and had found something solid for her, for the first time in her life. From then forward, she would seek the most her faith had to offer.