Youth fades;
love droops;
the leaves of friendship fall;
A mother’s secret hope outlives them all.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
Grandmother must have been about forty-six when I first met her.
I was already six weeks old myself and I couldn’t get together with her any sooner.
Mom’s parents lived four hundred miles away, before the Interstate and cruise control.
Before bridges even. We had to take a ferry across the Hudson River at Port Jervis.
I was Mom’s first child and she was only twenty-one, not much more than a kid herself.
Years later, many many many years later, she was still telling stories about how young she looked, still buying a child’s ticket at age seventeen.
She was five-foot-six and somewhat bosomy – gifted, some might say – so I suspect there’s more to the story.
Could’ve been an eighteen-year-old male ticket seller, I imagine.
I was an old man before I fully realized two things – Mother was a steely-eyed bullshit artist to her core and the ticket salesperson could’ve been a lesbian.
Of course, lesbians probably didn’t exist in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania in 1942, right?
I can almost hear Grandma now.
“What’s a lesbian?”
More about Mrs. Moore at a later date.
One winter morning, a Friday not so long ago, my mother was discovered dead in her recliner. The television played on. Know she died the night before. Watching ‘Jeopardy.’ Vana probably turned the first letter and Mom hollered out the solution to the puzzle and passed away from the excitement.