She Lived Jesus's Teachings

 

• My mother always said I was the good one. She was the good one.
• She was a stay-at-home mom until I was in fifth grade, then she started working.
• I used to play on the floor or table by her as she prepared meals. She was a very good cook. At our house there were never any leftovers. I loved when she cooked liver or made homemade pies.
• I remember our house being very clean.
• Once my mom had a pay check, she used it to buy a large, giant, chocolate Hersey's bar, and we three kids would divide it up while we watched the Walt Disney Show on Wednesdays.
• I knew that my mother made forty dollars a week.  One Christmas she bought me a Lionel train that cost forty dollars.  It was a Milwaukee Road GP 9 Desiel set. I was so impressed that she would work and entire week so that I could have a gift for Christmas.
• We had a garbage burner in the kitchen and a gas space heater in the front room. The house got very cold in the winter. It was so cold my mother put newspapers between our blankets, and she bought old men's overcoats at a rummy sale and put them on top of the blankets. The bedroom had no heat.
• One time I was laying in bed and I saw that my dad had so much wood in the garbage burner that the steel stove pipe going up to the ceiling was red hot and glowing. Scary that the house never caught on fire. The house only had one outside door, we lived on the second floor, and there was a wooden staircase that went down to ground level.
• I loved cowboys and indians. When I was small I had an indian chief that had a hand painted face. I loved that indian, but one day I was playing on the banister and it fell down a post all the way to the bottom. There was nothing I could do to retrieve it. I waited "several" years before our landlord had the porch repaired. I was right there with the carpenter and he was able to get me my indian back. Oh happy days.
• I loved the times we would get a new oil cloth for the kitchen table on a new 9X12 linoleum for the floor. I loved to play with my toys on a brand new colorful linoleum.
• One time my dad was drinking, and he ran his outboard motor in the basement. My mother got scared and took Mary and Jimmy to stay at her sister's house. I stayed home with my dad. When my dad was drunk he either got happy or tired. Never mean.
• My sister and I used to comb the dandruff out of my dad's hair. He loved it. We loved him.
• We were never hit, but my mother did throw stuff at us: like an iron fire engine and a wooden boat. Other missles too.
• I remember the sticky strips they hung from the lights to catch flies and the metal box on the wall that held farmer matches.
• One time my mother and dad were taking us to Doctor Davern to get our polio shots. My brother Jimmy jumped out of the car and refused to go.

• During the Great Depression my mother, her sister Dorothy, her sister Martha, and her brother Wally were placed in a Catholic orphanage until my mother was 18. The nuns, she said, were very mean. I'm almost certain my Uncle Wally was abused, maybe sexually. 
• My Grandmother remarried and had a son Peter. Peter was sent to college. Peter became a teacher. Years later,when my Grandmother passed away she left everything to Peter. 
• Peter had a son that he named Peter. They were both called Petie.
• I loved to tease my mother if she was talking about her half brother Peter, "Are you talking about Big Petie or Little Petie. The little big one, or the big little one?" My mom would reply, "THE BIG ONE!"
• I did the same with Big Gidget and Little Gidget. Even Big Gidget calls her daughter Little Gidget.
• My mother never complained, not about our poor family not getting any inheritance, not about being left in an orphanage for years: my mother was very forgiving soul. Saintly, if you ask me.
• A cowboy picture like the one above hung in my house for many years. I saw it every day and I always liked it. It took me a long time to find this exact picture to purchase for the memories. My mother's sister Martha wanted my mother's picture. We were poor, they weren't. They lived in a brand new house in the suburbs. We lived in a ramshakle two roon shack that didn't even have dorrs on the bedroom that we rented in Chicago. My mother gave Martha our picture. They were always selling us stuff they didn't want like American Flyer trains that had old fashioned couplers that were no longer in use. One day Martha and her family moved to California without telling my mother. She didn't hear from them for over twenty years. One day Martha showed up with a sob story about how her husband was an abusive drunk.and all was forgiven. Like the Prodical Son, my welcomed her back with open arms. I told you my mother was like Jesus's teachings. She was the kindest person I ever knew. My wife Moni is a lot like her. How lucky I am.