PASSING THE KINDNESS ON..........

My mother would have celebrated her 91st birthday today had she been given the gift of life for 14 more months.  She always looked forward to her birthday month, not because she enjoyed the birthday celebration but because autumn was her favorite season.  I always thought it so appropriate that she should celebrate her life in the middle of her favorite time of the year.  Every year when the leaves turn the color of her lovely auburn hair I continue to celebrate the life of this lovely woman whose greatest love and pride was her family.

My mother was a voracious "clipper", constantly clipping items from the newspaper.  It wasn't unusual for me to get an envelope in the mail from her that contained an item she had snipped from the paper that she thought would interest me.  Sometimes she would send a picture to which she added her own funny caption.  What she didn't send off to her children she carefully tucked in between the pages of her many books.  Everyone in the family knew that you better carefully go through any book of my mother's before giving it away.

Just this past week I finally was able (emotionally) to go through the few boxes of my mother's personal things that were carefully packed up for us by the nursing home after she passed away.   Among the things that she brought with her to the nursing home were her clippings.  Clippings of things that she wanted to remember, and that she also wanted us to remember.   A majority of the clippings dealt with the importance of kindness and being good to one another.  Items such as this....

"There is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us that it ill behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us".  
And one her favorite John Wesley quotes.... "Do all the good you can.  By all the means you can.  In all the places you can.  At all the times you can.  To all the people you can.  As long as ever you can."


If I could have a dollar for every time she drilled those ideas into my young head I would never have to rely on social security to get me through the rest of my life.  Her value on kindness extended into all of our lives for we often found ourselves sharing our Thanksgiving table with a stranger who had no family.  She would sometimes seek out the social services in her area to find the name of someone who was in need of family at that "family" time of year.  One year she had the "wonderful" idea of having a "sacrificial meal".  We had soup. The money that we would have spent on a turkey dinner was given to a family who were facing the day with the prospect of probably eating nothing more than soup.  As children we rather rolled our eyes at my mother's kindness and generosity and hoped that she wouldn't make it an annual habit.  As an adult it has imbedded itself in a corner of my brain and makes me wish I could be half as charitable as she.

Yes, she was kind and generous and charitable, but she almost demanded the same from those around her.  I thought of her on my own birthday this year.  She would have been so thrilled.  Paul took me to Scarpelli's for my birthday dinner.  Scarpelli's was a teen hang-out when we were young, a hamburg/hot dog/grinder type of place where you placed your order at the window and brought it back to your car.  Today it has evolved into a sit-down restaurant, know for good but relatively inexpensive food.  It still caters to the same crowd who are mostly 60+ now.  As we were sitting there eating our birthday dinner of an eggplant grinder one of Paul's clients came in, a man who also taught where I worked at the Middle School.  Ed jokingly looked at Paul and said "Oh God!  Is this the best you can do for her for her birthday?!!" and then sat in the booth behind us to eat his non-birthday dinner.   I ordered my favorite dessert, carrot cake, and was surprised to see it arrive with a candle and a birthday serenade by most of the restaurant.  Surprised because Paul just doesn't do that.  So I knew it wasn't him.  The mystery was solved when the waitress dropped our check on the table and said "That will be $2.50."  $2.50 for 2 grinders, drinks and cake??  Impossible.  She pointed to Ed behind us and said "He paid for $20.00 of your dinner.  Happy Birthday".  It made my day.  It would have thrilled my mother to know that someone was passing the kindness on.  Thank you, Eddie, for keeping the kindness going.  The world needs more people like you.  You're the best!!





 
 

Bits and Pieces of a Memory

 It has been 15 years since I stood in my father's hospital room, looking out the window at a blooming tulip tree while listening to his quiet breathing as it slowed and finally stopped.  My father's Thoreau type life was all about outdoors and loving the natural world.  It was so fitting that the blossoming of one of his favorite trees should accompany his passing. 


I miss him on Father's Day.  I miss him every day.  I would always invite him to our home on Father's Day where we would enjoy a meal, laugh at his jokes and watch him open his gifts.  While I know he enjoyed the gifts, it was just being together with his family that he enjoyed the most.
 

 

Because my father had to spend most of his time in the barn, fields or woods there was little time left to spend with his family, but he was still able to show us that he cared.  I can remember eating cereal from boxes that had cut-outs of trains on the back.  I would eat my cereal while looking at the back of the box and visualize what the train would look like cut out and put together, but my tiny mind and hands weren't mature enough for me to complete that process.  More than once I would wake up in the morning to find one of the completed cars where my father had carefully placed it while I was sleeping after he had put it together for me in the middle of the night.

Almost as much as my father loved his children, he loved his tractors and trucks.  From the time he was a tiny pre-farmer..............

.............until a few weeks before he died at 79.  When I hear a tractor my mind always sees my father bouncing around the field, lost in his world of hay mowing or manure spreading.










One of his tractors still sits in his half-finished barn on the Mosquito Path, slowly decaying with time.  Paul was recently up there looking at it and decided he would buy a battery and see if he could get the tractor to start.  Well, you know how that is.  Once you start fixing one little thing you can't stop.  Paul began bringing bits and pieces back to fix and soon we had half the tractor on our picnic table.

There is a LOT to keep a retired man busy.  The fenders need to be scraped down and repainted.  The carburetor needs to be rebuilt and there are a host of other things I don't understand.



Some unknown person decided that they would like to avail themselves of the gas in the gas tank so siphoned the gas out but neglected to put the gas cap back on.  As a result a group of mice thought it would make a lovely home.  The tank was full of bits and pieces of cushion foam and my father's shirts and jacket.  It's not easy to clean a mouse house out of a gas tank.

My father's habit of saving EVERYTHING (old bent nails, light bulb containers) used to truly drive me crazy.  Now we thank him for it because this old manual for his Farmall tractor that he saved  is also saving Paul's sanity (except for that one page that's missing that he really needs).  The manual is torn and fragile and even shows the scorch marks of surviving the milkhouse fire but it is a treasure that we couldn't do without.

Yes, I'm missing Daddy this Father's Day, as always.  I have bits and pieces of his life scattered all over my lawn and that feels good.  My husband is resurrecting a memory. No matter where I go my father will always be there beside me.  I have memories that make me laugh and smile.  Happy Father's Day, Daddy. 

Thoughts on a special daughter turning 40

Forty years ago today I was a youthful 25 and she was barely 24 hours old.  And I was in love....with my husband and with the sweet little baby Kara who had snuggled her way into my heart already.

Four days later we brought that 7 pound bundle of screaming energy home  from the hospital and life as we knew it was gone gone gone.  It was SO easy to take care of her in the hospital and SO hard at home.  The words of my pediatrics professor in college came back to haunt me..."No matter what you learn here, when you have your own child everything you have learned will go out the window".  Oh, Sister Helen, you were so right.  Kara cried and cried.  I didn't know how to stop her!  I went running to my pediatric text books but there was too much information that only served to make me more nervous.  The oldest of five children, I had watched my mother feed, soothe, bathe and love my brother and sisters with such ease.  How could something that looked so easy be so hard??

 I kept the image of my mother imprinted on my brain and soon began to relax enough to try the first bath, holding her and talking to her just as I remembered my mother doing.   She still cried a lot, and I mean a LOT, but one day our eyes locked and she smiled in answer to my smile and my heart melted.  My little sweetness...

Before we knew it she was celebrating her first birthday.  The years flew by. 

 

She helped Mommy in the kitchen.

                                  
                                         
She became my personal secretary and thus began her lifelong love affair with the telephone.

      

 She learned to drive.

 She helped Mommy hang out laundry.

 She joined the scouts and I had someone who would wave to me in the Memorial Day parade.

 She learned to play 4 instruments.

Before I knew it she had graduated from 8th grade.....

 

....and then high school.

 

 And 4 expensive years later she was finished with college and our strong, independent little girl was on her own.  Guess who was the one crying now??

Several years later she melted my heart once more as she was transformed into a radiant beautiful bride, walking on the arm of her father down the same aisle I had walked down 34 years earlier.

And suddenly life was completing it's circle as she found she was going to become a mother herself.
 

 First to a son.......and yes, there is justice.  What goes around comes around.  He cried and cried and cried.  A LOT.  

And then to a daughter, who is in every way just like Kara.  Wonderful joyous life is repeating itself. 

As they say, time flies.  And it does.  How fast those 40 years have gone.  Would I change anything if I could do it over again??  Nothing.  (well, maybe that crying business).  Kara is a kind, gentle, compassionate, insightful, determined and caring young woman with a great sense of humor.  I would not want to change any of life's forces that were in play to make her that way.

Happy Birthday to my Kara, daughter of mine.  

 "Before you were conceived I wanted you. Before you were born I loved you. Before you were here an hour I would die for you. This is the miracle of life."

- Maureen Hawkins