Dear Mom, I'll be thinking about you today...

The Dearest Things I Know...  a letter to my Mom on what would have been her 94th Birthday... 

Dearest Mom,

 

I’ll be thinking about you today.

December 9^th.

You’ll be pretty much ever present on my mind. I will think about the “we are so proud of you notes” you left in my school desk and I would find the next morning after a parents / teacher open house, or the birthday napkin carefully packed in my lunch bag on my birthday.

Or, how we’d wake up on our birthday, to open presents at the foot of Dad and your bed and then you’d go downstairs and cook a special birthday breakfast served up at the kitchen table.

I think a lot about that round formica kitchen table. White with gold, bronze and silver flecks.

You and I sat late into the night there at that table when I hadn’t quite finished a school report on Canada. You sat with me to make sure I got it done! 11:00 pm was pretty late for a fifth grader, trying to paraphrase the World Book Encyclopedia.

Every Halloween we’d sit at that round table, carving pumpkins with Dad, while you roasted the pumpkin seeds.

We’d sit there at that table, making Mrs. Campagnola cookies, rolling the dough into shapes and covering them with sprinkles, carefully placing them on the cookie sheets. You would shake your head when Carol and I would decide to make crazy shapes and stuff the dough as “surprise inside” cookies. You always included the ugly ones, made by our small hands on your holiday cookie trays.

I was sitting at that same table, when I was coloring, maybe about 4 years old, and I fell off the chair and chipped my elbow. I think after that we had to sit properly at the table.

You’d always have hot chocolate ready when Dad, Carol and I came home from sledding at Wheatley Hills Golf Course and we’d sit at the table and tell you how far we flew down the hill or how deep the snow was.

I’ll also be remembering that day I was sitting at that same kitchen table in the corner and you asked me if I thought you were my maid, and I replied back, “Yes, Gertrude, give me another glass of water, please.” So much for being “Catherine with a C.”

We spent a lot of time at that table in your kitchen. But then looking back now, you seemed to love being in the kitchen and being able to create there… from crafts, to serving up after school snacks, to homework, to cooking, or to chatting on the wall phone hanging nearby. 

I wish I had one of your Boston Crème Pies, or your Hershey Pound Cake. Remember how you’d bake a Hershey Pound Cake, wrap it in tin foil, pack in a box and send to me at college for my birthday!?! An Angel Food cake with your boiled icing would be nice right about now. Geez, I even though this week, about how good your fruitcake was and, I recalled, how finely you chopped all the fruit and nuts. Or all those tins filled with Christmas cookies every year.

It would be so much fun to be able to sit at that same kitchen table and shell pecans from Pa’s backyard just one more time. 

Or to have a leftover turkey on toast with gravy; maybe one of your corn muffins, or your spaghetti and meatballs. Not a Thanksgiving goes by that I don’t miss your gravy. And I even think about string beans cooked in your pressure cooker!

I recall liking to refer to your pressure cooker as your space ship and all I remember was to get out of the way, when it started to whistle and you moved from the stovetop to the sink. I have never known anyone quite so adept at using a pressure cooker.

Fact is, I am not sure I have ever seen anyone else use a pressure cooker. But you were a master. And you had a crock pot, and a crepe maker and a mix master, and that antique meat grinder ... all in your blue kitchen with the round table in the corner.

It was rare you ever served a bad meal or set an unwelcoming table whether in the kitchen or in the dining room. Most nights we ate together as a family in the dining room. You loved your dining room as much as any other room in the house, we'd sit in the living room and build blocks in front of the fire, or watch TV in the den and kid you about falling asleep in front of the TV (I do that now), but it is in the kitchen I think so often about you being the happiest.

You taught Carol and I how to cook and to set a beautiful table. And you insisted Carol and I helped every night and while you were cooking we’d talk and we’d learn, about entertaining, cooking, or maybe about how to treat others, to listen and lift them up. After dinner when you’d tell me to take out the garbage, I would lift up Carol and carry her outside. You’d laugh and then tell me that was not nice and I had to apologize to my sister as "she was all I had."

Funny, there are times when Carol or I am entertaining and we set a table and take a photo and text it to each other from one coast to the other: “GERTIE would be proud" we text. And then we text back: “Mom, sure did good teaching us.” 

(Texting, you’d need a lesson or two about how to text, but you’d get the hang of it.)

Or maybe it is just a text saying “got out the pilgrims,” or the “Easter rabbits” or the Angels or whatever it was for the holidays, Valentine’s Day, Fourth of July.  You made them all special. And Carol and I appreciated that. Not a birthday went by without those little colored plastic baskets of candy at every place setting and the birthday napkins.

But it was more then entertaining around a table that you taught us, you showed us how to open our home and hearts to others. That gracious style of welcoming and listening. And how to treat others. And to welcome anyone we met. To be careful about judging others too quickly.

I wish I could call Stillman’s florist and tell them to deliver your annual birthday poinsettia one more time today.

Or your gardenia corsage on Mother’s Day.

You taught me to nurture a garden and you always were so happy when I set about to pull some weeds and move some plants around in the ground. Funny, I really have never been able to do that as an adult. I remember planting various gardens for you up at Glenora when Dad and you retired. As you got older, you’d sit at that formica table and watch me at work through the window.

Remember how much fun we’d have on yet another shopping trip to Hick’s Nursery on Long Island as we’d plan your garden in late spring. You enthusiastically supported my love of gardening when I was growing up. As a Mom, you always had a knack for encouraging us to do things we excelled in.

After the annuals had died in the fall, we’d return again in December to Hick’s to see the holiday plants and decorations. Carol and I might get to pick out on ornament of our choice. You would let Carol and I help decorate the house and I still have the Styrofoam snowman ornament with sequin eyes and a rickrack scarf, we made at the kitchen table. I was probably about five!

I was sorta sad when after one holiday, you packed up various ornaments separately for Carol and I and said: “it was time we had these for our own trees.” And of course, not a Christmas comes and goes that I don’t carefully unwrap the red ornament with my name and birth year in silver glitter. Still in its original white box. Remember when I dropped it and it shattered across the floor and I burst into tears? You simply consoled me and turned to your Miles Kimball catalogue and ordered a new one, and the next year, there it was all new and shiny and ready to go back on the tree. There was no overnight shipping for Christmas back then.

I remember listening to you vocalize and sing after I had gone to bed. You might be practicing for a community concert or a solo at the local church or with the interfaith choir.

I don’t ever listen to Madame Butterfly, that I don’t recall the time I was sick in bed on a Saturday afternoon, and Texaco Met’s Broadcast was on the radio and you sat down on my bed and told me what was going on in the music. You got out your libretto and showed me how I could follow along. I think that was when I started to love opera. After you died, I took your bound opera scores with your handwritten notes for your preparation to sing Tosca and La Boheme, I cherish them both. And sometimes pull them out and listen along. 

One of my most cherished recordings is an old audition tape of you singing Vissi D’arte from Tosca dated from the early 1950s. It’s become part of the soundtrack of my life. Makes me smile to hear you sing.

Remember, how Carol and I would dance around the den and play Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Smile Without You,” and laugh when you’d bite your lip so as not to cry because we were going off to college. Debbie Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” was another lip biter as well as Karen Carpenter singing  “just like me, they long to be close to you…” You’d say we “were mean and disrespectful” as you were cautiously watching us grow up and cherishing these special disappearing moments.

Now when I hear those contemporary songs from the 1970s, and those from the 1930s and 1940s which you sang at the piano while warming up your voice as I was falling to sleep upstairs I smile. And I do hear all of them as all those songs are all on my playlist, that “soundtrack of my life” I as I call it. 

(you don’t quite know what a playlist is, but remember how I would make you a cassette of favorite songs???)

But now, I usually end up biting my lip to hold back my own tear. When I hear one of those songs, and listen to the lyrics, it’s as if you are here, close to me and I smile, thinking that “without a song” I would have never known “all the things you are" and I think can I "smile without you," as "you’ve always giving me hope to carry on, lighting up our day."

Remember, how we use to dance? In the kitchen, in the living room, at weddings, and other parties. Maybe to an old standard, or maybe to Earth, Wind and Fire. You’d just always remind me to lead with a firm hand on your back and not to pump.

“Hold my hand and keep your arm solid, don’t pump, you are pumping, If you want to pump go find a water well.”  You’d coach me.

Then you’d always talk about the same young beau from your hometown, who took you to a high school dance and pumped your arm tired and then went off and died in the WWII. 

I regret that very last day, as we sat at the same kitchen table we’d always sat at and we talked about all kinds of stuff, my coming out, about life, about love, about our family, about my closing my business and about the future. I even came back downstairs to tell you a few more things I realized were important. And you smiled and  said you already knew. I was so lucky in that moment and time and in that conversation, unknowingly saying so much I wanted to say, but oh, how I wish I had turned on some music and we had danced one last time in the kitchen. I regret we did not have that last dance.

You taught us to love music, to let it fill our life and to let it make us cry or to laugh or to dance.

You know, after you died, I took a bottle of your Tabu perfume off your dresser, and it sits on my own dresser and from time to time, I open it and close my eyes and I’m back shimming up close to you in your mink coat with your big red artificial Christmas rose corsage sitting in church on Christmas Eve and all is good, and I always remember that if I got too fidgety, because Santa was coming later that night, you’d take off your silver charm bracelet and let me play with it as we sat there with friends and family around us at the Community Church. I have that bracelet as well.

You’d be surprise that I eat oatmeal every morning these days. I laugh when I remember the time you decided we all should eat wheat germ and you tried to mix it by hiding it in my Life cereal. “What’s this round stuff in my cereal this morning?” I said sitting back in the corner at the kitchen table, “Life cereal’s crumbs are straight and someone put round crumbs in my cereal?”  Good try at healthy eating, Mom!

I can’t tell you how many times, I have thought about you and Mrs. Madison talking about being 50 and thinking how old that was, HA! Time flies. You've been gone over 7 years. 

And when I sit down and write a note, I look down at my handwriting and hear you saying "my handwriting now looks like chicken scratch" and I laugh as I think the same thing.

Remember all the hours we drove around the village practicing my parallel parking? 

Or the hours you spent helping me memorize my lines for the High School musicals three years in a row and then you came to the dress rehearsal and sat in the back just to make sure I was projecting my voice out to the back row.

Or the many years of being a class mother, chaperone on a field trips or Cub Scout Den mother. Not to mention the Brownies, PTA, bake sales, Sunday School teacher, the list goes on and on.

Recently, I needed to grab a band aid and realized I was almost out and it was time to go online to order another jar of Resinol Medicated Ointment. It is “good to heal all wounds" you exclaim or as Carol’s Joe calls it “Gertie’s get out the ouch medicine.” No one else has ever heard of it, but I still use it, just as you would when I'd skin my knees. 

(Ordering online... more for you to learn.)

You know, I've realized that only you ever wrote letters to me starting off with “Dearest John” and I still have a few note cards tucked away in special places with your inspirational sayings and quotes that you’d send me to encourage positive thinking.

I wonder if you were still alive, what you’d say today. I wonder how’d you encourage me on, I wonder if you’d still be proud of me, there are days, as bad as things get, I still think, “what would Mom do?” And what would she tell me to do to stop being so frustrated. I wonder if you’d still tell me to hang in there and keep trying. To keep putting one foot in front of the other. You’d have profound things to say about accepting disappointments in life and to keep believing in yourself. And I try, to offer my hand and my heart out to others less fortunate. And of course at some point you’d offer up one of my favorites: “What will be will be if it is meant to be.”

Mom you did good, Carol's, a good egg, you taught her well, she’s a lot like you and she keeps encouraging me and others forward. She looks after us all. Dad is Dad... 

You gave up a lot to be a Mom, and I hope it was all worth it. Carol and I were so very, very lucky. I miss you everyday. But today, I’ll be thinking about you even moreso, on what would have been your 94^th Birthday.

Most likely if you were still here, you’d be still holding court at that same kitchen table and spreading a whole lot of love to all who joined you there for a few minutes or an hour.

And if you asked for a drink of water, I would have said:

“Gad, Gertie, I’ll be glad to get that for you.”

"For all the things you were," you Mom, are "one of the dearest thing I know." 

Love always,

Your son - John