Sunday, May 13, 2012

News! and: saved by Mom.

First, an FYI that I'm kicking off a book tour tomorrow.  The wonderful people at Goddess Fish Promotions have organized it for me.  First up tomorrow is a review of Seized, and then the rest of the week I'll be posting various musings on various other blogs, a different blog every day.  I'll post the links on Facebook, and tweet them, too, each day.  But in case you'd like the whole list in one convenient place, I've added a tab called "Tour Dates".  Please stop by and post a comment.  And tell your friends! There's a $10 Amazon gift card in it for some lucky commenter.

The following week, Goddess Fish has arranged another tour for me, this one for book reviews.  I've put up links for those dates, as well.  One blogger is already talking about it.  I'm pretty pumped.

*****
So...I was going to annoy all y'all (that's the plural of y'all) with another punctuation rant this week.  But then I remembered it was Mother's Day (in the US -- the UK celebrated theirs last month).  So I'll save my semicolon spiel for another week.

I had a lovely Mother's Day today, thanks.  My daughter Amy got me flowers and a card, and took me out for breakfast.  My daughter Kat, who lives a few hours away, called, and we had a nice chat.

On the way home from running errands this afternoon, I reflected on how different my Mother's Day was than the ones we celebrated with my own mother.  Mom's been gone for a few years now.  She made it past 90 (I should be so lucky as to live as long...) and saw a stunning number of changes in her lifetime.  When she was born, in 1915, horses were still numerous on Chicago's roads.  She and my dad often called the refrigerator the "icebox" because when they were young, that's exactly what it was -- an insulated box that held a block of ice, which was delivered daily by the iceman.  Electricity was just being installed in homes when she was a kid; my mom's siblings used to reminisce about having fixtures on the wall for two types of lights -- a socket for a light bulb, and a gas jet.  The telephone not only hung on the wall, but you shared the line with other families.

She lived through the Great Depression, which instilled in her a kind of crazy frugal streak, and through World War II.  Then she got married to my dad and had three babies, one of whom died in infancy.  (Yes, smartypants, I'm one of the two who survived.)  And then the world accelerated:  faster cars, men walking on the moon, laptop computers, phones you can carry around in your pocket.  She never quite understood the internet, and she never gave up her manual typewriter for a word processor.  Heck, my brother and sister-in-law bought her a microwave, and had to pull it out of the box and plug it in for her, or she never would have used it.

But getting back to Mother's Day: I looked around in the restaurant today, at all the husbands who had taken their wives out for Mother's Day so that Mom wouldn't have to cook, and thought about how my family never would have done that.  My mother was always on KP.  A vacation for her was feeding us somewhere other than at home -- either out of the cooler in the trunk of the car or, later, in the RV.  If Dad ever cooked, it was an egg sandwich for himself, and then Mom would scold him for leaving her a mess to clean up.  So if we ever had a special meal for Mother's Day, chances are that Mom cooked it herself.

It's too late to make up for it now.  But Mom, wherever you are, happy Mother's Day.  I love you.

And happy Mother's Day to all the moms reading this.  I hope you've had a great day.

No comments: