POSTCARDS....a small card with a picture on one side...

May 18, 2013

Forgiveness


Mother all dressed up about 1910.

There was a newcomer at last night’s meeting who talked about forgiving her mother.  She got me thinking about my own mother.

My mother had a strong personality, and she followed the bent of her father and brother into engineering.  She graduated as the first woman architectural engineer from the University of Michigan following her brother, a naval engineer, and her father, an electrical engineer.  As a woman, she also followed the expectations of society and married right out of college.  She wanted children; he didn’t want children.  I have a photograph of her wearing riding gear while waiting for her Reno divorce to become final.

The depression slowed her down.  She sold encyclopedias door to door until her mother died in 1928.  Moving to California with her father in the 1930’s, she found a job as a draftsman in an architectural office.

With her daughter and father about 1952.

She met and married what looked like a good prospect in 1939.  Gunny, as he was called, had a LLD and wanted children.  WWII intervened, and Gunny came home an alcoholic.

“Why did you drink with him,” I asked her many years later.

She answered, “So he wouldn’t drink alone.” 

Once, sitting in a cool, safe booth in back of them at the Silver Dollar Cafe, I counted their lunch drinks.  Eleven martinis that day.  Then they went back to work at the little print shop mother had started in our basement so they would have income coming in.  Mother was one of those responsible drunks, a mean, in control drunk.

She had family that cared.  She had a daughter….only one.  With severe learning disabilities that no one understood in the 1940’s.  Also in the 40’s, she had colon cancer and was told she was going to die.

“I was hard on you because I had to make you self-sufficient,” she told me years later.

Her father died in the early sixties. 

With scotch dripping into an IV so he wouldn’t have the DT's, in 1966 Gunny’s pipe smoking metastasized into a cancer that killed him in a particularly awful death.  Just about the same time, his mother died, and my mother was left rattling around in the big house very overweight and unhappy.  She went on a diet, switched from martini’s to scotch, sold the house, and drank herself happier on an around the world cruise.  Or two.  She loved cruising.  Loved taking her hotel with her.  She had so isolated herself that she had no friends left.

Mother on a golf cruise, perhaps 1971.

She found an apartment near the bay in San Diego, and she drove to a favorite near-by bar to write letters and schmoose over scotch in the afternoons.  She met a charming charter boat captain there, and not long afterward they moved in together.  She was older.  He drank just as much as she did.  He had a yacht.  He was gay….but that didn’t matter to mother.  He bought a bigger yacht to make her happy.  I’m sure she paid for it.  They cruised the coast of the California’s in company with many of his friends.

On board the Meg-A-Bob, 1984.

Once two miles off the coast, her eldest granddaughter dropped a piece of chewing gum on the deck.  An angry mother tried to kick the granddaughter overboard.  She gave her daughter a car then took it back.  She said she would pay college tuition but tried to back out.  She was good in the mornings, and mean at night.  She was mean, and she was cruel in every phone call. 

She faded away her way with diabetes caused renal failure, and her husband had her cremated.  For a year or more, there she sat in a box on her chair.  One day the box was gone.  Where?  We don’t know for sure.  My husband thinks she is in the landfill.  I think she was thrown overboard at the dock. 

I spent years working through her meanness with therapists and other caring experts.  I grew to forgive her and realize she did the best she could do with who she was.  I was freed when I realized I didn’t have to like her…and I was able to let her go at last.




  • Keeping those on the east coast in my thoughts.


  • Himself:  Found new BBQ for the Friday meeting that folds.  Perfection.  Computer games, Ross Dress for Less, the Automotive Museum.  Maybe dinner out.


  • Herself:  Write, Ross, paint, dinner.  My children have a lot to forgive in me also.


  • Reading:  ”My War,” Andy Rooney.


  • Balance:  Life is pretty darned good right now.


  • May 16, 2013

    Painting by Numbers


    1980’s Prismacolor Pencils.

    I’m uninspired, but it’s something I must do.  Art.  Any form. 

    I remember at age 4 or five painting a recognizable kite in the sky, then knowing that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. 

    At age 28, I took my first painting classes, and while at Southwestern took jewelry, pottery, graphics, drawing, and anything else they offered.  90 some units of passionate art.  That was me.  My second time around, I majored in painting.  More passionate stuff that led to a number of one person shows.  I’m known as a Colorist. 

    After a long break when my big drawing board went into storage, I’ve done nothing.  I’ve thought words not paint.  Now G has set me up with a small worktable behind the sofa in the living room.   I want to work with watercolor and added layers of pencil and pastels.  No realism.  Ink gestures for boldness.  Lots of white spaces to give drama to the whole.  Messy fun stuff. 

    Creating can be a big struggle for me.  Great blank spaces often fill my mind.  Not only are my colors fugitive, so is my thinking.  Uninspired silences in my head lead to silences in my life.  I’ll jackhammer a hole in that silence this week and see if I can let a little light into the darkness.




  • Keeping those on the east coast in my thoughts.

  • Himself:  His last day covering someone else’s queue was yesterday  He’s loving doing his own job today.  They sent him a gift card and tickets to a Padre’s Sunday day game.  Let’s hope it isn’t raining Sunday.

  • Herself:  Checking my schedule first.  Write list:  Toenails, fingerprints on doors, mail package.  Swim, write about art today.  Writing about passion.  Broken crown:  Have a gap and must floss often.  Floss, floss, floss.  Run errands, fix dinner. 

  • Reading:  ”My War,” Rooney.

  • Balance:  Giving away the M&M’s we bought.



  • May 14, 2013

    Thirty Years


    Last night at the Brigantine with a chowder and salad to start.

    I forgot.  

    When I got home from the gym, he greeted me with a pair of silver earrings and a charming silver pin of a house along with a hug and a kiss.  But I got him nothing.  I forgot that it was our thirty-year anniversary.  Frankly, I’m very embarrassed.  I’m either dramatically changing the way I remember things or I am beginning the long slide into dementia.  I so hope not the latter.

    We had a great day despite my embarrassment, and a delightful dinner out.  The delight didn’t mitigate the fact that I forgot this very important anniversary.  Starting this morning, I will look at the appointment book first before anything else.  Today it tells me I have school and a dental appointment at noon…for a broken crown.

    The year we met in the tiny cottage by the sea.  The white bookcase to the left is in yesterday's photo.  The old Morris chair is in our living room today also.


  • Keeping those on the east coast in my thoughts.
  • Himself:  Doesn’t say anything about how bad I have gotten.  Looking forward to both NCIS’s tonight.
  • Herself:  Very lumpish and embarrassed.  Determined not to forgot the 31st.
  • Reading:  ”My War,” Andy Rooney.
  • Balance:  Apologizing, letting go, and forming new habbits.
  •