I don’t believe that there is a person in the room today who would dispute that my mother was so very precious and special.  Ours was the home where all of my friends always felt the most comfortable.  Mom was just so much fun; she was like one of the girls.  In fact, she’s the one who taught us all of the girly things.  When we were little she always kept a secret place in her closet where she kept dress up clothes for us to wear, and she’d create lots of great art projects for us to do. She never really minded a mess, and every single one of my girlfriends, even as we grew older, called her their second mom.

As many of you know, when I was only 4 years old, and my sister Wendy barely even 1, our mother nearly lost her life when she caught fire from our backyard barbeque.  That was her first, and the most serious of a series of uncanny accidents. There were no burn centers to go to back then and the doctors did not expect mom to live.  “I have two children to take care of” she told them, “I will recover from this.”

Her mother, our grandmother, came out from New York to care for us while she spent three very long months in the hospital.  That September when I was to start school, my mother told my father exactly which dress, which shoes and which socks to dress me in for my first day of Kindergarten.  At that time children were not permitted to visit hospital patients, but my mother’s room was on the ground floor and there was a window where she and my father arranged to be at a certain time.  Before school that first day, my dad brought me to outside the window so that my mother could see me in my pretty dress and give her approval.   I never forgot that.  She was so happy to see me, and I was so happy to see her.

The fact is, and I know I am very lucky to be able to say this, but there was never a time that I wasn’t happy to see my mother.

If you knew my father well, as I believe most of you did, you are probably aware that his favorite word in the English language was probably “No.”  In fact my mother spent the better part of their 52 year marriage learning to creatively navigate around that inevitable response of his. When they were invited to go somewhere, or invited to try almost anything new, or a little bit more expensive, my mother could always be heard saying “let me work on him.” 

But after so many years of butting heads with my dad over what I called “his negativity,” I eventually matured enough, and I grew up enough to realize that this wonderful, selfless man actually spent the better part of his life saying “yes,” particularly once he’d said yes to marriage and family.  My father was the most loyal and hardworking person I have ever known.