O-Dark-Thirty

Dad, Mom and me in 1958. On 12/12/12 I wrote a post about the number twelve . Suddenly the number twelve has another meaning. I think of my Mom often, but there are two dates that I think of her especially and miss her. As I said in a post a few years ago, some pains never really go away . You just get used to them. A little bit. Maybe. One date I think fondly of Mom is her birthday, January 17 . The other date is today, November 21. Twelve years is a long time to miss you, Mom, but it went pretty fast. Twelve years ago today I was laughing and talking with my Darling and my two youngest children. The phone rang. My brother Barry was on the line. "Vince, you need to sit down," he said. I didn't hear the tremor in his voice. "Okay," I replied, moving toward a chair in the dining area. "I'm sitting. What's up?" "Mom died." I really should have been sitting. I dropped into the chair. "You...

I remember Spam™ but as a food that Mom liked and we boys tried to avoid. Avoidance wasn’t always possible. Mom always shopped at the Base Post Exchange (PX) for food. I remember those trips, especially when I was a little older. We went to the base in our station wagon, Mom and me and my three small brothers. I remember Barry about five, Dave about three and Tim two. That would make me nine or ten. Mom would get two carts and put Tim in the seat of one of them. She put Dave into the seat of the other. Barry sometimes sat in the cart itself, but mostly Mom required him to just walk next to one of the carts and hang on. He wasn’t supposed to let go, and he usually didn’t. I pushed one cart and Mom pushed the other. I had to make sure that Dave and Barry didn't do anything wrong - though Dave was pretty well secured and Barry came back every time he wandered away. He was careful that Mom didn't see him for the wrath of Mom was always to be avoided. The goal was to fill the...

Mom would have been 78 this year. Happy Birthday, Mom. When our cousins laughed and told my youngest brother that Grandma Jen wasn't our Grandma he just smiled and walked away. "She's my Grandma," he said. When they told me, I was irate. I was eight years older than my youngest brother, and I knew it wasn't possible for Grandma to be my cousins' great Aunt. I also hate being confused and I knew Grandma Jen was our Grandma. In a family tree Grandma Jen was our great Aunt, our real grandmother's younger sister. We have very little information on our grandmother. Elva Gertrude Elston was born in Sanilac County, Brown City, Michigan in 1915. She left the farm and her family and moved to the big city of Detroit when she was eighteen. According to relatives she never used the name Elva, but went by the name Peggy. She was very beautiful. My Aunt Ida (Peggy's youngest surviving sister) told me that Peggy came home to the farm for a few weeks duri...

After my Mom died I collected all the documents she had on her computer and some that were simply written by hand on scraps of paper. A few were stories, one of which was her version of Christmas . One of the other documents she had was Mary Stewart's prayer, one she mentioned to me years ago. At the time I didn't think much of it, but Mom thought it was important enough that she kept a copy of the prayer. When I ran across it recently I wondered what kind of prayer the Queen of Scotland would pray, and why - and who preserved it. I had the wrong Mary. Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, queen regnant of Scotland, wife of Francis II of France and potential heir to the English throne, lived from 1542 to 1587 and was executed by Elizabeth I, who found her guilty of plotting against the Crown of England.  Good book anyway!  It also was not Mary Stewart, the English author of The Merlin Trilogy , ( The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills and The Last Enchantment ). I really l...

(Not quite this bad, but... Read on!) One of my brothers is now adding more war stories from our respective younger years to his blog. Already he covered an analysis of my blog post on Mom's meatloaf , a funny confession of electrocuting our youngest brother , and now a post giving the enduring tale of Mom's grits . Somehow I think he still thinks Mom was a good cook. I loved my Mom and I miss her all the time. At some level I can say that Mom was a good cook. She had the fabled ability to take a quarter pound of meat and expand it to a complete meal, including vegetables, for four growing boys, my Dad and herself. Let me be clear, however. I'm the eldest, and I watched Mom cook. I can say with absolute authority that she imbued beef flavor into a steaming pot of water and beef bouillon by waving a small piece of left-over beef over the top of the kettle. This was her beef stew recipe. She tried, as evidenced by the foray into cooking Southern grits ( my short...

 Delilah Smith - Onsted  Mom loved to write. I don't know how much she actually wrote; much of it was on paper and in wire binders and is now lost to us. Some few stories actually survived as computer files and I have the ones that I could find. This is my Mom's story of Christmas, in her own words. Christmas at home began right after the Thanksgiving weekend as my grandmother would start to bake her wonderful fruit cake. She made many of these cakes and I think gave some of them away as gifts. She made them in the big round bottomed dough pan that she used when she made bread for the family. They were also baked in the bread pans and wrapped in brown paper. I think she probably basted them from time to time with something but I don't remember for sure. We kids were pressed into service as the raisins were ground and nuts were chopped. The kitchen smelled delightfully of cloves, cinnamon, and ginger for ever so long. The catalogues (wish books) were gi...

Sir Richard Branson Sir Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin Group and a space pioneer, recently posted his first blog post on LinkedIn. The article lists his five top tips for starting a successful business. While I read them I thought of my Mom and many of the lessons she tried to teach her four boys. Many people I know don't belong to LinkedIn. I do. I have a profile there instead of on Facebook. I used to think of LinkedIn as a professional Facebook, but it has changed over the years and become more social. I don't know when they started the blog posts, but if anyone has something interesting to say, it is Sir Richard Branson. Here are his tips: 1. Listen more than you talk. Okay, my Mom used to tell us that one and it still applies. More than that, though, you have to learn from listening. Oh, that's the tidbit I might have missed! 2. Keep it simple. Wow, Mom used to tell us that also, usually when we were trying to find a good excuse for not doing our cho...

Never this pretty at our house, though I've written about Mom's cooking before, so I won't go into it here. There is one funny story, though, and it has to do with the milk we got from Aunt Nora. Mom often let the cream separate and then scooped it off the top before she watered it all down. We would occasionally be allowed to have some cream on our berries as dessert, and it was lovely. One time Mom decided she was going to do something special and make whipped cream, from real cream. She added the sugar to the cream and beat it. Then she had me beat it for a while. She was looking for that smooth, fluffy appearance, but wasn't getting it. So she beat it some more. I actually remember the look of puzzlement on her face when she stopped beating that bowl of sweetened cream. We now had butter. Mom invented sweetened butter. We loved it. She never tried to make whipped cream again. Mom was always canning food. We had a pretty good garden and Mom canned a lot o...

Elston Organic Farm, LLC - run by Uncle Jerry's son Lee and Lee's son Garrick All the relatives cared for Mom while Dad was away. Most notable among them was Uncle Jerry. He dropped by to see Mom a few times each week, quite often leaving an extra can of food, or some small package that he bought too much of. The best story of all happened one Saturday, though. Uncle Jerry came in with a long face. I remember, because he always seemed quite content with life. "Jerry, what's wrong," said Mom, sitting him down at the old vinyl table and giving him a cup of coffee. She sat in the chair next to him. "Fran, I have a problem." (He probably called her Earline, a name my Mom hated, but grew up with in Brown City. If anyone called her Fran, though, it would have been Uncle Jerry. Earline is actually the name listed in the 1940 census also. Mom would have hated that.) "I'll do anything I can to help, Jerry. What can I do?" Mom clasped her ...

 Maids a-milking Mom's Uncle Dwight, similar in appearance to Don, always seemed as good-natured as Uncle Don seemed ill-tempered. We didn't see much of him because he worked all the time. So did his three daughters and his wife, our Aunt Nora. A working dairy farm seemed a hard life, and I think it was. My three cousins were up every morning before dawn to do the morning milking, and to bed late after the evening milking and homework and other chores needed to keep the farm running. I once tried to help my eldest cousin, a girl a few years older than I. She hefted a full five-gallon milk pail in each hand and carried them to the ice house. I barely managed to drag a single container out there. Some help I proved to be…  Mom visited Aunt Nora for milk and took us with her most of the time. I'm sure we disrupted the household routines, but it was always a pleasure to see our cousins. Mom refused to take charity from anyone, even her local relatives, so sh...

During the recent trip to Michigan my brothers mentioned that they would read my blog if I wrote more stories about our childhood times. Not that I crave readers, but it does seem like a good idea. Some stories can be inspirational, some can be warnings, some simply informational and some likely boring. But I do have stories, so this seems a good place to share them. Since we just came back from Michigan, I can start in the middle, in about 1968, the times we spent in Michigan. This will cover a few posts, but I'll start with some background. We lived in Brown City Michigan when Dad was in Viet Nam. Mom signed me up for fifth grade and then had to correct it to sixth grade after I went for the first day. I don't recall what I said, but I was probably pretty upset. That sort of thing bothered me, even then, and I'm also sure I didn't want to repeat fifth grade. Once was enough. Instead of going to school in the main building in Brown City, I went to class in Burnsid...

As I sit and work I listen to music, when I can. (Thank you, Pandora.) Celtic Thunder is one of my favorite Pandora Channels. I just heard a song I've not heard before. From their Heritage Album the song is called Gold & Silver Days. They sing of the songs their mother sang to them as children, and how the days were sweet though they were poor. We were poor. We children didn't know it. I wasn't even aware of it as a teenager. I knew some people had things we didn't but I paid no attention to that. I had a ball glove, a tennis racket. I had friends who had pools and boats, and that made me happy. After all, they were my friends, and I could ride in their boats and swim in their pools. Once in a while I did. Tom Streeter was one of my closest friends in North Carolina. He owned a boat (well, his Dad did, but at the age of fifteen we didn't make a distinction). He and I used to go out on the Inter-Coastal waterway all the time in that boat and we had a lot of...