my mom Archives - Page 4 of 16 - Ramblin' with Roger

1972 – the surprise party

New Hampshire primary

Mar 5 – After playing pool with Uthaclena, I stopped at the vending machine. I took off my boots to keep my roommate’s floor clean. One of my socks came off. I walked into my room. I saw a stranger, the Okie’s roomie, then my father near the window, and my sister Leslie near my roomie’s mirror. SURPRISE party! Shocked was more like it.

Marcia, Mom, and of course, the Okie and the roomie were there. My family brought Kentucky Fried Chicken, cake, and some beverages. The roomie made a general birthday page in the dorm, and a few people came by. Leslie took her friend Joe to the bus station, then returned. The Okie’s mother and baby sister visited.

I got from my family two rolls of Scotch tape, a bottle of Stridex, 24 8-cents stamps, underpants, a nice blue shirt with a strange VOTE button, and some albums:
Color Blind – the Glitterhouse
Stoned Soul Picnic – the Fifth Dimension
Santana III
There’s A Riot Goin’ On – Sly and the Family Stone
The Okie was worried I wouldn’t like the Leadbelly album she bought me, but I did, especially Bourgeois Blues and Gallows Pole.

The Okie’s father arrived before my family left. Apparently, he was nervous to meet them for some reason, the Okie told me later.

The Okie and I went to see the movie Last Summer, which she found very upsetting, relating to Cathy Burns’ Rhoda. (Burns, who died in 2019, was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.)

After the party

Mar 6 Yesterday must have really thrown me because I was so disorganized. Couldn’t find my checkbook or notebooks. Forgot the meal ticket booklet, the fact that one of my classes was canceled, and that my gym stuff was in my laundry

Mar 7 My 19th birthday. Also, the day of the New Hampshire primaries. According to WNPC: Muskie 42%, McGovern 34%, Yorty 8%, Hartke 4%, with votes for supposed non-candidates Mills (5%) and Kennedy (1%). (Official numbers were slightly different.)

Did three loads of laundry. Uthaclena gave me the John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band album.

Later, I suddenly became very depressed, in part about off and on communication with the Okie.

In general

A lot about snowball fights, doing schoolwork (I really like my Basic Economics II class), Uthaclena reading comic books (e.g. Green Lantern/Green Arrow 89), the Okie’s unreliable car, writing letters, and eating ice cream sandwiches.

Feb 24 – Uthaclena received the Bangladesh album. I gave him Absolutely Live – the Doors. A couple of days later, he bought Pictures at an Exhibition – Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.
Feb 26 – Bruce Goldberg had said on WNPC (college radio) that Muhammad Ali was going to meet the kangaroo boxing champion of the world. Apparently, MSG was going to sue Bruce for defamation of character over what was a joke.

Mom died on Groundhog’s Day 2011

It was a Wednesday

My mom died on Groundhog’s Day. It was 11 years ago, in 2011. Now, it’s 2022. A lot of repeating numbers. It was a Wednesday. Today is Wednesday.

On one hand, of course, her passing is a singular event. Looking back at my blog posts from February 2011, specifically 2, 3, 6, 9, 16, and 27, and subsequently, I had the need to write more about that time than possibly any other. The death of my dad in 2000, before the start of this blog, has been discussed, but retrospectively.

The day before, I had arrived in Charlotte, NC. Leslie was already there and Marcia lived there. They said that mom was doing better than she had been since she entered the hospital the previous Friday. I had heard that people often seem to rally a bit before they die, but I saw no reason to mention that to my sisters.

I slept in a chair, or maybe two, in my mother’s room. About an hour after she had awakened, she sounded as though she were suffocating. So I buzzed the nurse and this army of folks descended on the room. Someone noted to me in a scolding tone that she had a DNR, Do Not Resuscitate. Yes, I knew that.

I wasn’t trying to get her rescued, just to make she wasn’t uncomfortable. To myself, but not to the medical personnel, I muttered, “Sorry, I am not savvy on the stages just before death. This is my first one.”

Passing

And, in fact, when she did pass away, I was unaware until someone told me. My sisters were en route, so there was no point in calling them. When they arrived about ten minutes later, one noted that she looked peaceful and comfortable. I got to break the news. I signed some paperwork, as I did for dad. Then there seemed to be this rush for us to identify a funeral home to send her body to. This made me cranky too.

I can recall my emotions to the response to my February 2 post. I had written about four days earlier that I was going to Take The Train To Charlotte after my mother’s stroke. So the early comments were of the “I hope your mom gets better” variety. But after I told Denise Nesbitt via email that Mom had passed, she clearly circulated the news. If I want to cry Right Now, I can just read the later comments.

Now, I feel like an Orphaned Adult but that happened and is now just IS. Life post-parents have allowed my siblings and me to have more honest conversations about the ‘rents.

So when Mom died on Groundhog’s Day, it was a long time ago. And it was last week. One of those funeral parlor quotes, which I suppose I’d normally find overly sentimentalized, I somehow like right now. “There is a link death cannot sever. Love and remembrance last forever.”

Bowling with Trudy and Roger

Turkey Mountain

roger.mom_.1971 One of my sisters suggested I write about my mother and bowling. I was resistant because I don’t particularly remember the details. Where did she bowl? How good was she? Who, besides her good friend Pat, was on her team?

But I capitulated in large part because of one true thing. She and I were the only ones in our nuclear family to join a bowling league. My sisters bowled occasionally. Did my father bowl at all?

As a result, mom and I had a shared lingua decem paxillos. We could keep score by pencil; this was before those sometimes flawed automatic scoring machines. It’s not particularly difficult, but my mom and I liked the math exercise.

And when I was a tween, I was rather good at the game. I once scored a 186 when I was ten, which was pretty impressive, actually. The terrible thing, though, is that I gave it up after only a year or two, and I don’t recall why. But my mom, it seems, continued for quite a while when she still lived in Binghamton.

BTW, I don’t remember where I bowled either. The lanes on Laurel Avenue, where I sometimes went in high school? I have no idea.

Peaking in fifth grade

Oh, I never did get much better than my grade school pinnacle. At college, I would play occasionally with friends, but I broke 200 only three or four times. My all-time high score was 222 when I was 22. Seriously. It was the day after Candid Yam, her brother, her sister and I went up Turkey Mountain – how appropriate! – in 10F weather, consuming brandy.

Then I’d play irregularly until my left knee became so sore that I couldn’t release the ball correctly. My mother, I’ve only recently learned, had to give up bowling when her hip began to hurt her.

Today would have been mom’s 94th birthday. I picked this picture from c. 1971 because my sister says her favorite of my mother and me together.

Pinochle with my mom and dad

a hundred aces

Pinochle is “a card game for two or more players using a 48-card deck consisting of two of each card from nine to ace, the object being to score points for various combinations and to win tricks.” Within the game, it was also specifically “the combination of the queen of spades and jack of diamonds.” It’s pronounced PEA-knuckle.

I’ve participated in lots of card games in IRL: canasta, bid whist, hearts, spades, casino, gin rummy, 500 rummy. Yet the only game I have on my phone is pinochle. I’ll play it just before going to bed, or maybe as a diversion from the frustration of the day.

As I figured out, it’s because it is a thing that I played with just my mom and dad. This went on from when I was about 10 until I departed I went to college. And the double-deck version, which is my preferred iteration to play, is a game I’ve only ever played with my parents. It didn’t involve my sisters, just the three of us.

Cut-throat double-deck pinochle involved holding 26 cards in your hand. The nines are removed from the deck, and the person winning the first trick got the two-card kitty.

Jack of diamonds, queen of spades

So I think it is the case that pinochle is a reflection of my parents. One can have a lot of points (meld) to bid. For instance, a pinochle is worth four points, but a double pinochle is worth 30. A triple pinochle is 60, and a quadruples is 90. A double set of jacks are worth 40, a double set of queens 60, and a double set of kings 80.

But then you have to take enough points via tricks to actually save the meld, or you forfeit it. A hand with multiple pinochle or two sets of face cards don’t have a lot of power. For that, you want several aces and/or length in a trump suit, preferably both. My dad was the flashy high-meld hand, while mom was the one who always tried to make sure that high-bid hands weren’t for naught.

This is, I recognize, an imperfect analogy. One can have hands with lots of points and power (double sets of aces are 100 points, double runs of JQK10A are 150). But my parents seldom had an easy time of it. So when I fritter away my time on pinochle, I’ll think of mom and dad, who had gotten married 71 years ago today.

Gert and Gertie – make that Trudy

the anniversary of my mother’s death in 2011

Gert and Trudy This a picture of my mother as a child. She’s with HER mother, Gertrude Yates Williams. Like Lorelai on Gilmore Girls, Gertrude and Clarence Williams, if he had a say in the matter, named the girl after her mother. (Clarence was apparently quite marginalized by my grandmother’s mother, Lillian Archer Yates Holland.)

There is an odd thing in the photo. My mother looks rather sad, but actually, that often seems to be the case in pictures from this time period. The real revelation is that my grandmother looks happy! In all the time I knew her, she never looked particularly cheerful. Maybe that’s because as long I knew my grandmother, she told us she was on death’s door. She also had bad teeth, if memory serves.

My mother was working outside the home, at McLean’s department store in downtown Binghamton. So my sisters and I would go to my grandma Williams’ house for lunch. This meant we went to Daniel Dickinson in grade school rather than Oak Street. This, of course, fundamentally changed the trajectory of our growing up.

At some point after she married our dad, mom stopped being Gertie, a term her remaining cousin Fran still uses. She became Trudy. As best I can recall, I never asked her why she changed her nickname. Perhaps it was obvious, to distinguish her more from her mother.

Control

When I was an adult, I did talk to mom about all the scary stories her mother would tell to keep us in line. Tales of boogie men, real and imagined. (Grandma’s next-door neighbor, Fred, was pretty terrifying when our ball would inevitably land in his yard.)

My mom acted surprised that her mom would use fear to try to control us. And BTW, Gert’s tactics worked pretty well with Leslie and me. Not so much on baby sister Marcia, who could see through her lies. Mom probably knew what was happening. I suppose she thought that Gert’s sister Deana would be a mitigating force against Gert’s BS. It was somewhat true. I loved Deana dearly, but she died in 1966 before she turned 60.

Anyway, today is the anniversary of my mother’s death in 2011. It recently occurred to me that this is also around the time my grandmother died. It was January 24, 1982. I only remember this because my father (I think) called me during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVI, when San Francisco 49ers beat the Cincinnati Bengals, 26-21.