Melancholy Baby

I always get a little melancholy this time of the year. It would have been my mother's 80th birthday today. Sadly, I didn't make it to Mass as planned today, but will, God willing, attend tomorrow. A few days from now on the 8th will be the 15th Anniversary of her death. I ache for her touch, and would give anything to be able to kiss and hug her as well as listen to her good counsel.

My mother and her brothers and sisters sat for this formal portrait in the mid 1930s. Her maiden name was Shelak - and the photo was taken in Northampton or Lehigh County, Pennsylvania.



Back row: John, Catherine (my mother), and Anna
Front row seated: Mary, Andrew, and Helen


I expect the kids are in their Sunday best. 4 of the six are now deceased. My Aunt Mary who is now well in her 80s is getting frail now, and the other surviving aunt, my aunt Anna, is advancing in Alzheimers. Not pictured is my Uncle Joseph, who was born a bit more than a decade after this picture was taken. He's only 9 years older than I am.

These children of my emigre (Autro-Hungarian empire) grandparents did quite well for themselves. They all were married and had families 6 of the 7 marriages stayed together, which isn't a bad percentage as things go considering the turmoil of the 60s and 70s. Uncle John was a WWII veteran who saw duty in the Marines on Guadal Canal among other places, he later became a long distance truck driver and was based out of Texas - his 3 children and their families are still in Pennsylvania.

My 3 aunts pictured here all worked in the garment industry and each could sew like a dream. Not a gene I inherited. All were ILGWU members. When you could still get clothes made in the USA and not sized for some sort of pygmy with no hips or boobs. Let me put it this way: They not only knew what a "dart" was, they made them - and could do their own patterns too, and often did. Mom gave up working outside the home when she married my dad (also a Korean Era vet who worked his way up the food chain to be a plant manager for a beverage company). My uncle Andrew was a veteran of the Korean War and he later went to Layfayette College on the GI bill and became a chemical engineer. The youngest, Joseph, [4F from a motorcycle accident and my only uncle who wasn't a vet] graduated from Penn State and became a hardward/software support guru for IBM mainframes pretty much in the late 60s when mainframes where huge gully whumpers which took up whole rooms for about the power of a computer you're sitting in front of now.l He's almost retired. Joe and Andy also bopped around the country a bit, both "homing" back to Pennsylvania - my own family moved to California (after stays elsewhere) when I was 14. And my mother's sisters all lived literally within a block or two of each other and their mother. When we were all little kids together, it was great to be able to bounce around between the 4 houses. Now one of my cousins still lives two doors from his mom (Anna) and his sister and her husband still live close to the old family homes (two still occupied in houses in homes my uncles and grandfather helped build.)

Given the tendency of cyberspace to hang around, I dedicate this post to my maternal cousins and their children and their grandchildren and coming grandchildren and future generations-- maybe someday they'll "google" "Pennsylvania" and "Shelak" and see this photo of their predecessors.

I've written quite a bit about my mother before, but to throw in something a little fun I must say that while dad and I enjoyed fishing (especially in my teen years) though dad and I usually came up with something or other and didn't get totally zipped - mom always had a "string." She just had more patience than the two of us put together! God knows she was the only one who regularly came home with halibut while the two of us were aced out.



Oh, just to taste on of her fish fry ups once more. Happy 80th birthday, mommy.

Happy Birthday, Mom

If my mother was still living, today would have been her 79th birthday. She died in '95, and truth be told I've never "gotten over it." I don't know if I ever could. I don't know that we're meant to. Last year I wrote a tribute to her virtues, but in reading over it now, I think I may have forgotten to give a picture of what a figure of pure FUN and delight my mother could be.

She grew up in a poor family in the 30s and 40s. Pictures of her from that time period are hard to come by, especially compared to the sheer number of pictures people take today. She's in her mid-teen here, rolled up jeans, posing with a baseball bat. She and her sisters all played softball growing up, in school and on teams. She picked up the love of the game from her immigrant father. For close to 30 years we had full season Padres baseball tickets. Dad and I were both huge fans of the game too -- but mom was the one who was the "go to" who remembered who was traded for whom, and all the statistical details. When each of my parents died, I ensured a ball that was caught at one of the games went in each casket. (Yes, we sat behind home plate, and yes I have a stash of them from over the years. Not a huge number, but more than most people come up with in a lifetime.)

Mom also LOVED to travel and was extremely down to earth and never put on airs. And she didn't have much truck with people who did. She loved to garden and had a green thumb I could only dream of having. [I think I got a recessive "kiss of death thumb" from somewhere, because dad also had a green thumb.] My mom was also very good at "fixing things" in the carpentry department. Also a talent she got from her dad. Her ONE, SOLE advice to me as in matters of love and marriage was "don't EVER fall in love with a salesman, because they can't fix squat." [Dad was a saleman, who couldn't fix squat, as you may have guessed.] But mom had "the golden hands." When I was growing up we'd wait for him to go on a business trip before we'd change out the screen doors. Dad would attempt to "help" and the job would take twice as long.

As for traveling she was always ready to go some where. She loved seeing new places and old favorites. She was my favorite companion to go to Europe with, which we did together a number of times. Also Hawaii was a big family favorite. We were always at our best as a family when on vacation.

My favorite travel story with her was this: We'd decided to take the hovercraft from France to England. [Do they still have that?!] She hated small, fine print, and had asked me to fill out her declaration form for her. I asked her (she'd who'd been a housewife ever since she married my father) "what profession do you want me to put down for you?" She said, "oh, 'housewife' is so dull -- just put down 'socialite.'" I snorted, she laughed and said "Well, I'M SOCIAL, why not?"

Why not indeed? So I duly filled it in on the form. An hour or so later we'd finally gotten to the front of the line at customs and stood before a beaming young British lady who was looking at our forms. I'd quite forgotten my mother's exchange with me (we'd been distracted and amused by two travellers trying to elbow their way by everyone -- rather unsuccessfully, I might add.) But almost out of the blue, the Custom's lady looked at my mother (who was wearing non-descript "mom jeans" and a pull over shirt, and she said: "What's it *like* being a socialite?" We all burst out in gales of laughter.

Dog days of Summer....

...we're in them and I hate it. I love spring when we start to get longer and longer hours of sunlight, and then we still can revel all through July ... but there's no denying that in August, the days have already started to cut back on sunshine, and the weather gets downright sultry and I don't want to do zip much of anything.

Early August also coincides with dredging up memories of my mom's last birthday and her death and burial. A sad time all around for me, but I'm glad at least she didn't die around the holidays, particularly Easter. It would have been almost unbearable.

I can remember the last birthday gifts I gave her. One of which was a movie called "Come to the Stable" which she'd described to me earlier that year, and I saw at the video store not long before her death. It's more of a Christmassy story...nuns wanting to buy a non-Catholic's land so they could build a hospital. So there we were, the weekend before my mom died, watching this Christmas movie in the hottest part of the year...I could hear a death rattle in her throat, or the precursor of it, and tried to deny it to myself, but on reflection I think I knew. I'd not gone to Mass that Sunday, afraid to leave her for a few hours. But what pleasure for her to see that movie which she'd not seen in roughly 40 years. So 13 years ago today, at exactly this time we were watching that movie.

The photo above is one of my mother when she was in her early 20s. It was her "girl next door" look. Unlike me, she could parallel park. (Well, not more than a 3 point turn at most.) We did, once, when I was about 10 take the '66 turquoise Thunderbird (then brand new) out for, not a "spin" but a fly. We were living in Roanoke, Va. and she'd come to pick me up from school. There were two ways to get down the hill from St. Andrew's Parish towards our home. One road was pretty good, but a little further from the church, the other was rather steep. It went down a San Francisco like incline, flattened out to a rather short straightaway, then down another steep grade. You really had to ride the brakes going down. Well, 90% of the time we took the less steep route. However, one fine afternoon we'd taken the steeper route. Mom sorta "forgot" and took the hill like she did the other one. Yes, she realized late and we simply FLEW off that short straightaway. All four wheels off the ground. We predated Thelma and Louise by a number of years. We decided this little story was something dad best not know about. Not right then, anyway. God, how we laughed all the way home and forever after.

Mom and Me

Today would have been my mother's 78th birthday. She died on Aug. 8, 1995. She was a wonderful mother, and I adored her. I'm not going to say we didn't have our mother/daughter fights, because we did. [Like Bill Cosby's mom, my mother was also an expert on pigsties. Because she told me that I'd had the "worst pigsty I've ever seen."]

I always appreciated the fact that she was always there for me, emotionally, intellectually, and physically. She came from a poor family (not uncommon in the depression years she grew up in) but she was always rich in love. She supported me in everything I did and never tried to box me in as some mothers did in the 50s and 60s with daughters. She never said things like "Girls don't do X, girls don't do Y." She always said "If you think it will be fun, just do it." I didn't fully appreciate this until I was older.

Given the time frame my parents grew up in, a good education was hard to come by and neither graduated high school, much less college. But they always provided me with all the books I wanted and made sure I got the intellectual stimulation I needed and I was provided with all the education I wanted. I was the first girl, either side of the family to graduate from college. [Though granted I am blessed with far more male 1st cousins than female.]

My mother hated petty gossip and was not what you would call particularly a "joiner" though she did have her friends. She always kept busy with raising me and looking after my dad and she did the bill paying, gardening, most of the housework, and a lot of the home maintenance work (dad had the "two left thumbs" gene but mom got her dad's "golden hands.") She was a great cook - nothing "fancy" but she made all the beloved ethnic foods of my heritage (Easter was always our favorite time of the year, and Christmas a distant 2nd.) How wonderful to come home from school at lunchtime and have a nice hot vegetable soup and a toasted cheese sandwich. You could taste the love that went into it. When I was small I was the recipient of many handmade dresses and skirts. She also drove my lazy carcass to school when I didn't get up in time to catch the school bus. We loved to travel together.

She was usually a daily Mass goer, and the best thing she ever did for me was pass on her faith. My dearest memories of her were going to Benedictions and prayer hours with her when I was growing up, and her listening to my prayers at night.

There is not a day that goes by that I don't miss her. The above photo was the one my dad carried in his wallet until the day he died.