More On Mom

Part 2.

I really am not sure what my mom would think of these posts. She doesn't read blogs, but I'm inspired to write about her, and so I will.

Mom grew up the adopted child of a well off couple, but oddly enough, and against their wishes, at some point she regained contact with her biological brother, Albert. No one called him Albert, we all called him Uncle Frankie. He was an interesting character. I remember he and my dad both drove trucks at one time. Eventually my dad went to pharmacy school and became a pharmacist, but Uncle Frankie kept on driving trucks, and he did it his whole life. My impression of him was that he didn't have much use for rules, and did what he wanted to do. I remember liking him, and thought he was a lot of fun to be around.

When mom first started off in nursing, she went to work at a mental hospital, that is where she found out that her mother had died as a patient in the asylum. According to mom, her mother was not mentally ill, but suffered seizures. Mom said that her mother had had a seizure and thrown my mother, as a baby, on a hot stove, and I believe this is why she was committed. The details are quite sketchy, but this is what I was told. Mom said that she died of pneumonia at that hospital.

In 1975, I was 5 and in kindergarten, I remember my mom taking my sister and I to meet our biological grandfather. He lived in a dingy little apartment off of downtown. It was a studio type of apartment if my memory serves, and there was not much furniture in it, but a bed, and a couch. I will never forget going into the kitchen and opening up the refrigerator and seeing nothing in it. It was nearly completely empty, as was his dark little apartment. When we arrived, he seemed quite pleased to see us, and he was kind towards my sister and I giving us each a small soup can full of pennies. This is the only meeting I remember of him, although I believe we did see him more than once, I was just too young to remember much. We called him grandpa Noah, and I thought he had a really neat name.

We moved 2 states away the next year, and I never saw grandpa Noah alive again. In fact, I can't remember when exactly he died, if it was before or after we moved away, but 1976 is the date that comes to mind. If my memory serves me correctly he died before we left. When he died the family called my mother to pay for the burial, and she did even though I don't think she hardly knew him either.

Before we moved we lived in a little duplex, it was actually a big house divided into two, on the outside of town. It was surrounded by a cow pasture, and a few other houses. It was owned by a man named Mr. Wilson, who used to come and take me out to the pasture on his tractor. He was a very nice man, and I was a 5 year old completely enthralled with the cows that lived practically in my backyard. I spent my days wandering the enormous yard, and would stand at the barbed wire fence calling to the cows hoping they would come close enough so that I could pet them, which never happened. One day I took it upon myself to try and climb through that fence, and mom told me she heard me screaming and ran out to find me tangled up in it. That's when I learned those things hurt. I never did try to climb through that fence again.

In the other half of the house, a couple with a little girl a couple of years younger than me moved in. I was so shocked the day I discovered someone living there, but I was thrilled as the lady was filling up a small pool of water and immediately invited me to play in it. She was German, and had an accent. I'd never met a German before, didn't even know what that was actually, but she tried to teach my sister and I how to count and things. Not long after they moved in, in the evenings we would hear a lot of yelling and screaming over there. Mom said she thought that man was beating on her. I think this was quite frightening to my sister and I.

One day the lady was our neighbor, the next she and her daughter were living with us. Dad was away at pharmacy school, and it was just us girls. I don't have any idea what happened to this woman's husband, never really heard of him again. I remember my mom taking her to apply for jobs, and all of us girls going with mom to pick her up from work when she got one. They lived with us until we moved.

Uncle Frankie came to help us fill up a U-haul to drive to our new home. Dad was finishing up his residency and had landed a job at a hospital there. The lady, and her daughter were going with us. I don't think I found this odd at all. It was the night before we were going to leave, and I remember all of us girls were sleeping on the living room floor that night, Uncle Frankie was there, and it was like a light bulb went on over my head when I realized that, Uncle Frankie and the lady were going to sleep in the same room. That's when it dawned on me that they were a couple. I remember asking my mom why Uncle was going to sleep in her room, and she just shushed me, and told me to go to bed.

We headed out the next day, and when we got there my dad had a little apartment for us to live in until we found something else. Frankie, and the lady and her daughter got themselves a place to live, and I almost forgot they had come with us. I'm not sure if some kind of falling out happened with the adults, but Frankie and the lady moved away about a year later. They actually went back to where we came from, and stayed there. For the most part, that was the end of him in my life.

The last time I saw him I was in my 20's, and he and the lady came to visit my parents. We hadn't seen them in years. I don't know why. They were married, and were doing well. He was still driving trucks, and the little girl was all grown up. He died a few years later of lung cancer, at the age of 58. Mom went back to help, and to be there with them. I know it was very hard on her. I believe those last few years my parents had rekindled a relationship with them, and to this day my mom is still in contact with the lady, and talks of going to see her.

The lady and her daughter were the first in a line of people that my mother took in over the years, the woman was from a foreign country in an abusive marriage, was completely broke with no where to go, to my mom taking them in was the only decent thing to do. I guess mom couldn't stand the idea of having a big house if she couldn't offer a room to someone who needed it. There were more, and they seemed to find their way to my mother as if she just radiated something that called to them. It is a theme in my mom's life, and so much of who she is.

More later.