Family
If You Don’t Have a Gift Bag Full of Used Gift Bags, Are You Even a Mom?
The truth in a mom-meme
My mom (who reads the stories I publish) mentioned to me that I often write about my grandmas but that I never write about her getting older, though she has been a grandma for ten years now.
Maybe it’s discretion — you’re not really supposed to refer to someone’s age (or so my grandma taught me). More likely it’s my nostalgia-focused mind playing tricks on me. My mom is a retired preschool teacher, after all, so she has a perpetual youthfulness. She’s always been the kind of person who could pull together a craft project out of thin air, or suddenly start dancing in the middle of the grocery store.
Stoppppp! My brother and I used to whisper in the produce aisle when the Muzak would start playing the Mamas and the Papas and our mom would say, Oh, I’m gonna have to dance now…
I also remember a story she told me years later about how her bowling team was in a slump, and she told them she’d start singing if they didn’t perk up. Someone asked what she’d sing, and off the top of her head, she started into a variation on Frank Sinatra:
Once there was a little old ant,
thought he could move a rubber tree plant.
Everyone knows an ant can’t
move a rubber…
