Hey, Mom! Talking to my Mother #15 - Memorial Service pt. 5 - Dinner

Hey, Mom! Talking to my Mother #15 - Memorial Service pt. 5 - Dinner

Hi Mom, The picture above is one of my favorite pictures of you. It's a pretty good picture of Lori, too. It was taken in 1985 shortly after my college graduation, for which you gave me a camera. I snapped two shots at this meal. I will share the other one another time. I like this one because you haven't even noticed yet what I am doing.

There are several things in this picture that remind me of all our times together and what a wonderful mother and human you are (I am still not ready to use past tense for you.) and how you cared for our home and our family. You're wearing one of your favorite t-shirts and your wedding ring. There's your pills by your plate and the Village of Richland glass you liked so much filled with water from the well. This is the typical dinner: chicken breasts in a light white wine sauce, broccoli, I suspect there's rice somewhere that is out of the shot. Lori has a small salad, something you insisted she have, in one of those little bowls you liked. There's also the ceramic bowl (bottom left) that was among your favorites used to serve the vegetable. And you can just see the corner of the yellow place mats that you used as hot pads in the center of the table once you discovered that they did not function well as actual place mats. The dining table runner is folded neatly and on the counter over Lori's left shoulder. You can see other things that you liked to keep on the counter: the crystal starburst candle sticks, the miniature statue dad made of you as a study for the larger version, and that wooden thing that held very thin, orange fabric "flower" stems. I am not really sure what was the deal with that wooden thing. It looks like there's a book on the counter, over your right shoulder, probably left there by me, and something you would make me remove shortly after taking this picture.

The other photo has a bit more data. I am fairly certain this is a summer time photo. Look at your hair. You had recently been to the beauty shop, possibly even earlier that day. I love your facial expression here. I caught you at a time when you did not know you were being photographed. That's your natural face. Not a pose. Just one of the millions of moments when I saw your face, just normal, over the last 53 years. I wish I had more of those moments captured. The every day life moments.

Do you see the butterfly hanging over Lori's left shoulder? You may remember that when Liesel and I returned to that house and lived there for two years, I brought that butterfly back, but I hung it in the wrong place. I hung it on the wall that would be over your left shoulder, which we could see if the shot was a bit wider.

All of this is lead in to share the next part of the talk from your Memorial Service, in which I shared about your insistence on making us all dinner, even when you clearly did not have time. In the picture above, you had time, and you were not yet fully Frantic Woman though you were very intense.

You were always intense.

So, dinner.

Here's the passage from the Memorial Service on the subject of dinner:

Dinner also became an issue. She would not let us make dinner. We would get these calls at 6 or 6:30 from Meijer that she was stopping to buy what she needed and she would be home soon. Then in full Frantic Woman mode, she would scramble to try to prepare a meal before 8 p.m. She didn’t always get it on the table before 8 p.m. We offered to make the meals so that they would be waiting for her when she got home – remember in these stories my sister and I are both adults. She would not entertain such plans. She insisted. She was very intense about it and often quite frantic.

Okay, that's through about 1000 words of my talk that totaled a little over 3000 words. More to come in the next installment.

Like the laundry, turnabout is fair play. I made so many dinners for you, Mom, in the last fifteen years, though not as many as my father, who fixed your plates every night, and my sister, who pre-made many meals for freezing that Dad would stretch out for days once thawed and heated.

I would like nothing more than to fix a plate for you tonight, Mom.

On an unrelated note, Hey, Mom, I want to show you this video. It has nothing really to do with the subject of dinners and you, but I am listening to this song/watching this video, and I wanted to share it with you. I have a history of sharing things with you that I like but that you are not going to like. Why should that change now that you're dead? :-) Plus, the video seems REALLY metaphorical.

Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you.
Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.

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- Days ago = 16 days ago

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1507.20 - 12:04