Thinking of my mom ...

When you get to my age you have time to let your mind sift back through the accumulated detritus of past years and sometimes revisit moments and experiences long thought forgotten. Sometimes, like last night, those bits and pieces trigger dreams and, if you're like me, dreams can trigger feelings that are as real and emotional as they are in the bright of day.

Last night I had a dream that was not about my mother, but in which she was just there, as if it was normal, and she was real. There was no plot in the dream that I can remember. Only that I was home in the old wooden house on US 41 next to the sawmill my dad owned and, I think, in the kitchen. In the dream, I was not directly engaged with my mom. She was just "over there" at the edge of my line of sight. It is a "still" scene. No movement or action that I can remember. I awoke immediately after that and was filled with the feeling of just having my mother near me again, a feeling of safety, and, somehow, warmth. I'm 83 now and and haven't felt that feeling since I left home for the last time in 1963 when I watched her and my dad standing at the Brooksville bus station as I left on a Greyhound bus for flight training in the Marine Corps. I was still a kid then. When a saw them next, four months later, I no longer was.

So, after my dream and maybe because of my dream, this day has became one of those when I'm thinking I need to begin getting all the papers I've kept through the years in order. You know those that intentionally or not, time-stamp events and seemingly document if not simply suggest who you've become and what your life was about. One of those papers was a piece I wrote on December 18, 1993, in honor of my mother's 75th birthday. It was a wonderful surprise organized by my sister, Vicki, to which her entire extended family and many friends were invited and who turned out in full in her honor. On that day the plan was for me to pick her up to have lunch with my two sisters. When she walked in to that room she almost fainted when over a hundred people started singing happy birthday. Her surprise was real and it was a joyous day.

So, the piece I had written in her honor is below. I was supposed to stand read it, but couldn't finish it. Vicki had to read what I couldn't. It's about who she was and, for me, will always be.