Mom

My mother died September 2008. It was a difficult experience when she died and has been difficult since she showed the first signs of senile dementia around 1999 when I took her to Europe. When she wouldn't come out of the motor home--EVER-- as my kids and I, my son's friend and my Mom traveled from Munich to Aoste, Italy through Austria and Switzerland.  I drove a 6 passenger diesel 5 speed stick shift motor Home that we rented in Munich and since it was my first trip to Germany, it was very paradoxical to have my mother become so strange during that part of the trip.

She had been fine in England and Scotland where her mother and father were raised in Clydebank and Ayre, Scotland respectively.  My mother's parents had married there and had immigrated to the U.S. around 1910 and settled in Omaha, Nebraska along with most of my grandmother's 11 other brothers and sisters who worked on the main newspaper there at that time. After my mother was born, the youngest of 3 girls, they got into a Model T Ford and came to Seattle and settled in Alkai Point.  My mother, who was born in 1919, remembered being 5 years old and going to the picture shows (movies) walking there with her Dad and two sisters and also swimming in the Puget Sound in the summers. Later she told me of how her oldest sister won a beauty contest in high school and worked at that same local theater in high school.  I think her oldest sister married pretty soon after high school and her husband started a supermarket. after my uncle died, my aunt ran a restaurant and put all her three kids through college.

When I was five,  her older sister would visit us in Tujunga,  California.  Her youngest son was one year younger than I, and when I was six, he accidentally got hit in the head with a rock and I got blamed for it even though it was my next door neighbors' fault.

I remember Mom singing a lot when we lived in Seattle. It seemed like it was always cloudy or dark or rainy or snowy all the time we lived in Seattle at Lake Forest Park from 1948 when I was born until 1952 when we moved to San Diego.  My father was an electrician and worked for his father and hated working in the rain all those years. So when I was 4 and he was 36 and Mom was 33, he packed us all up and drove down in his 41 Century Buick, owned previously by my dad's brother who died in a plane crash in 1942. It was a really fast car and sometimes my father street raced with it, with mom and me in the car, especially in Southern California. People thought a lot differently about that sort of thing back then than they do now.  Or maybe my family took more risks. The whole world seems to be a lot more fear-based now than then.  I remember my parents being so alive.

I remember standing up in the back seat of our 2 door Century Buick like this one.  Dad's was originally blue.  There were no seat belts or standard green, yellow and red lights at intersections back then in Seattle. There were only stop and go signs that operated a lot like railroad crossing signs
so there were always many more accidents and deaths on the road. When Dad turned a corner fast, often I would just hit the  door wall and bounce off a doorknob because I was standing up on the rear seat behind the driver's, pretending I was driving the car. I might whimper from the pain but usually if I was with my Dad I had to be tough like a man even at 3 or 4.  I just held in any pain I felt from injuries when I was around my Dad when we were driving somewhere.