Tag: Mother’s Day

The Tulip Festival and politics

In November, New York State is going to vote on whether there shall be a constitutional convention.

There has been an annual Tulip Festival in Albany on Mother’s Day weekend for decades in Washington Park in Albany. If I go these days, it’s always been on Saturday, because Sunday involved us driving to somewhere south of here to have dinner with my various in-laws.

But THIS year, my parents-in-law were in Florida that weekend, and since the Saturday weather was pretty rotten, we went after church. We listened to some music; Radio Disney’s version of White Room was OK instrumentally, but not so much with the teenage female vocalist. We ate some food, went to some vendors.

How the city gardener gets the various plants to usually come up at just the right time is impressive. My buddy Chuck Miller took some nifty photos of the flowers here and subsequently.

My favorite part is going to the activist ghetto, where the school district, some religious organizations, environmentalists, and more are set up. In November, New York State is going to vote on whether there shall be a constitutional convention. The NY Civil Liberties Union and others, such as the ad hoc No New York Convention.org against it, noting that the LAST time this was held, about 50 years ago, most of the people selected as delegates were sitting politicians. Plus the ideas they came up with were voted down by the voters.


We saw this scene after the Tulip Festival on the way back to the car, in a window on State Street in Albany, the photo taken by the Daughter. It made us wonder about the back story. Who put up the sign first, and was the second sign in response? Are these adjoining apartments, or posters in the same one?

Which reminded me: My friend Sarah and her husband Darin were recently interviewed as part of series on married couples with divergent political views. The producer was particularly interested in the incident in which she unfriended him on Facebook. “Better that way,” she says, and that is certainly true. Oddly, I’m still FB friends with him, but I usually stick with comments about minor league baseball player Tim Tebow.

Mother’s Day 2017

Mom in her red wig period.

HA! I was looking at my May posts I completed, and I assumed I’d written a Mother’s Day something about my mom. But I was misremembering. I had written about my sister Marcia for her birthday this week, and that post is largely ABOUT my mom.

So I decided the heck with it and picked some photos off Marcia’s Facebook, most of which I don’t believe I’ve posted before.


Here’s my mom with HER mother, Gertrude Williams, and my sisters Leslie and Marcia, in her red wig period.


My mother with her mother’s people, the Yates, including Gert (2nd left), her aunts Charlotte and Deana. I have no idea what she’s looking at. This is in Binghamton, NY.


Mom with our family friend Betty, probably at the latter’s home near Binghamton.


I could ask someone who Sammy is, but this predates my father being on the scene.


Mom with her middle granddaughter, Alex, Marcia’s daughter, in Charlotte, NC.


Mom with her eldest Yates cousin, Raymond.


Mom with her eldest child, in Binghamton.


Mom with her eldest child, in Charlotte.

I will say that, unlike THIS mom, my mom hardly ever swore, and not just in front of her kids.

Mother’s Day 2016

mom_meI was watching Anderson Cooper and his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, talk about the book they wrote together.

In the interview, Cooper said that he “realized there were many things that neither of them actually knew about the other. We decided, on her 91st birthday, to change the conversation that we have and the way we talk to each other.”

“According to Vanderbilt, it was all done by email.”

“‘I think we’re both at a place where both of us didn’t want to leave anything unsaid,’ Cooper added.”

It struck me, HARD, that there are plenty of things that I never asked my mom, because… well, I don’t know, actually. Maybe it’s because she often spoke as though she were reading from the same script.

I’d ask her how she was doing, and invariably she’d say “busy but good.” Busy with what? Sometimes I’d get an answer, but more often than not, a response that really didn’t answer the question.

If I could ask her now, on this Mother’s Day 2016, I think I’d want to know:

*How were you punished as a child? Did they use corporal punishment?

She was an only child, surrounded by her mother, aunt, grandmother, and sometimes, an uncle, so she didn’t get away with much.

She didn’t like to give corporal punishment, that’s for sure. She was pressured by my father, who, especially when he was working nights at IBM, didn’t always want to be the disciplinarian hours after the fact.

One time, she actually struck me on the butt. But you can tell her heart wasn’t in it.

*How is it that you never learned to cook?

Your mother and aunt could cook.

*Were my sisters and I breastfed?

I suspect not, because the convention at the period was to use the bottle. And she could be very conventional.

*Did you think my father was faithful to you? Or did you have reason to believe he was not?

Then I’d get some names to fill in some genealogy holes. I’d ask her some questions about her theology, something beyond the perfunctory responses she often gave me.

Of course, that window of opportunity is more than five years past.

Mom was about everyone else

This is my fifth Mother’s Day without my mom.

trudy greenAs I have mentioned, my mother had a miscarriage in April 1951, I believe in the second trimester; it would have been a boy.

When Mom told the story to me, or to me and one or both of my sisters – she tended to tell her stories more than once – it was in context of her explaining why my father was at arm’s length when I was born two years later: he was afraid I might die too.

But I don’t ever recall her mentioning how SHE felt about what I imagine must have been an incredibly emotional incident.

Now that I think on it, she did that a lot, explaining my father’s feelings about his growing up, or being in the military, or dealing with being wronged. Or describing her mother’s eccentricities.

She did note that she was a lousy cook because she was spoiled from being an only child living with at least four adults (mother, grandmother, aunt, uncle) when growing up. But there was never much about how she FELT about it.

In fact, the only time I can remember her talking about her feelings took place well after my maternal grandfather’s father (who even I called Father) passed circa 1960. He was a very strict, church-going pious man, who she admired greatly. When the family discovered booze and girlie magazines hidden away, she was devastated; the underpinning of her values were a bit shaken.

I wondered how she processed things. When I asked her about her theology back in the 1980s, she declared that she should be a good person; this was a bit loosey-goosey to me. She then proclaimed she followed the Ten Commandments. OK – so what does “Thou shalt not kill” mean in terms of the death penalty or self-defense? In several conversations, she never really described this.

My mother WAS a very good person, very outwardly focused, caring about others. Everyone thought she was a very sweet woman. Sometimes, though, I wished her had been a bit more selfish, figuring out what was important to HER. Being squeezed between the dominant personas of her mother and her husband may not have left enough room for her SELF.

This is my fifth Mother’s Day without my mom, and it still makes me surprisingly sad.

Bring back the bad weather!

The Daughter has almost exactly the same symptoms.

EMPACMother’s Day, May 10, was absolutely beautiful. Blue skies, decent temperatures, no rain, flowers in bloom. Had a nice dinner with an extended troupe of in-laws in Catskill, an hour south of Albany. Got home that evening, went to bed with a hacking cough, which led to a sore throat, in lieu of sleeping. This was not a cold or the flu; this was an allergy, to trees, and grass, and pollen. There are conflicting theories as to whether a long and harsh winter could lead to an equally irritating spring allergy season because it postpones the budding.

All I know is that I was miserable, despite getting injections every four weeks for several months. Now I’m on Fluticasone (nose spray), Advair (an inhaler), and am taking Zyrtec tablet (actually the OTC equivalent); the latter makes me tired, so I take it only at night. I’ve been sleeping sitting up for most of last week and a half. Oh, yeah, The Daughter has almost exactly the same symptoms.

Saturday night, The Wife and I went to the concert of the Albany Symphony Orchestra at The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in nearby Troy. EMPAC is a technological marvel, but more than that, it is really cool. Inside the glass enclosure, it reminds one of a ship, in a good way.

I was so looking forward to the concert. ASO highlights living composers. But shortly after the beginning of the first piece, by John Harbison, I felt a coughing jag coming on. Since I was smack dab in the middle, I had to quickly climb past several people, and leave the theater. Couldn’t stop coughing for about ten minutes. Finally, the hacking subsided, and I caught, outside the doors, most of the second piece, also by Harbison.

But I was happy to sit in the back while catching Scattered, a “Concerto for Scat Singing, Piano & Orchestra,” written and performed by Clarice Assad. Here’s the second movement, performed a couple of years back; that section is much slower than the first or third movements.

After intermission, composer Joan Tower, who is quite funny, introduced her piece that featured famed percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie in her return to the Albany Symphony; she played on the ASO’s Grammy-winning recording, awarded this year. Glennie, not incidentally, has been deaf since the age of twelve.

The concert was not a total bust, as I did to hear more than half of it. Still, I want this lousy feeling to GO AWAY.

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