Heading Back Home

We held mom's funeral yesterday and immediately the family gathered and addressed the thank you notes followed by a little target practice in the back yard. After seven days in the hospital, a day at the funeral home and a funeral my relatives are all back to work and my son back to Purdue to take his exams which his professors graciously allowed him to postpone; "They are all caregivers, dad, they understand."

During the week, at the funeral home and at the funeral many "Mom Tales" were told.

The Tree House

Twenty years ago my nieces, Julie and Cathy wanted a tree house so the boys got together and slapped together a typically Schmidt undertaking, a 12' by 14' house with screened functioning windows, a loft, a door, electricity, heating, television, phone and a deck, in the woods behind my brother's house. The kids loved the place and spent a great deal of time there. My mother, ever the pragmatist, gave Cathy a toilet seat for her tenth birthday. How exactly it was to be employed shall ever remain a mystery.

Questions

My mom could ask more questions than anyone could possibly answer. During a tribute a brother said, "I was told that 'your mother would have wanted...' I replied 'How could you possibly know? Every question was answered by a question. Mom loved hot dogs. Last week I called her and said 'Mom, I'm passing in front of Coney Island, do you want me to get you a couple of Coneys?' She replied, 'Where are you?' I said nothing. After a long pause, mother said 'Are you going to answer my question?' I replied, 'I asked you a question, you haven't replied yet. You answer every question with a question.' To which mom replied 'Do I?'"

Take out the Garbage

My younger brother Paul recently degraded into becoming a Facebook user. One of his first postings, not too long ago recalled the time back in '72 or so when a galvanized bushel basket filled with metal was left on the curb by the Grosse Pointe trash collectors. Mother ran out and told them to take the contents of the basket and was met with the reply that it was too heavy to pick up. Mother stormed down to the curb, picked up the hundred pound container and hoisted the contents into the back of the truck. Don't mess with mama.

Poker

Nothing like a family night of low stakes poker and beer. But if you bet out of turn and mom was around, you had to bet again when it was your turn. She had a wonderful poker face, you could never tell when she was bluffing or had a straight flush.

Grammar

Mom was a stickler for grammar. Walking to the cashier's she looked at her basket, full of goods and at the sign that said "10 items or less" and gave a resigned shrug. "I know mom, they can't help it." It wasn't that she couldn't check out in the express lane, it was the fact that the sign should have read "10 items or fewer" that bothered her.

Old folk's email

Mom wanted to keep up with things going on in the family. She kept the broad band connection even after dad died, but couldn't get the hang of using the computer. One Christmas we got her an "old folk's email" machine. It would dial into a provider, download email and print it out. One day she called me to tell me she couldn't stop laughing about an email I sent her. She made many copies and posted them to her friends. My kid brother was appalled at the type of stuff I sent her. Here is the one she liked most.

John O’Reilly hoisted his beer and said, “Here’s to spending the rest of me life, between the legs of me wife!”

That won him the top prize at the pub for the best toast of the night.

He went home and told his wife, Mary, “I won the prize for the Best toast of the night”.

She said, “Aye, did ye now. And what was your toast?”

John said, “Here’s to spending the rest of me life, sitting in church beside me wife.”

“Oh, that is very nice indeed, John!” Mary said.

The next day, Mary ran into one of John’s drinking buddies on the street corner. The man chuckled leeringly and said, “John won the prize the other night at the pub with a toast about you, Mary.”

She said, “Aye, he told me, and I was a bit surprised myself. You know, he’s only been there twice in the last four years. Once he fell asleep and the other time I had to pull him by the ears to make him come.”

Stocks

My brother sent his stock broker to my mother's to give her advice on her investments. After and hour he called my brother and said that he could be of little help. I am sure she was outperforming his portfolio.

Once I tried to get her to enter her holdings into Yahoo finance, then she could see her position with the click of a mouse, but she would have none of it. While entering the second stock for an obscure bank I had never heard of I was shocked to see that it had appreciated 48% in eight months. "Where did you hear about this bank?" "From my hairdresser." Whatever, it worked.

She would sit at the kitchen table and with a giant ledger calculate her position over an enormous quantity of stocks, she sure believed in diversification, every position was small but she tracked them all. The light over the kitchen table had three bulbs and cast shadows. Peering at the newspaper through a magnifying lens she would write down the closing value and multiply it by her shares held and then tally up the figures. The shadows were problematic so I offered to install a new fixture. We parked in the handicap spot, she got out her walker and slowly, ever so slowly walked down the aisle of Home Depot with the aid of her walker. Finally she chose a fluorescent fixture thirty inches square. I removed the old fixture and wired in the new holding the fixture to the ceiling with my head as I tried to screw in the anchors. Every few minutes I uttered an expletive.

I looked down to see her trying to climb a ladder to help me. "Mom if you try to get up on that ladder again, I'm going to leave the new fixture and the old fixture on your table and walk out the front door. Sit down."

My Thanksgiving Facebook Status

After I posted last Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving. The godless son of a bitch that I am gives thanks to my parents for the wealth of experiences and instilling tolerance of mankind and love of nature. My mom wanted it framed and hung on her wall.

Fishing on Lake of the Woods

I was in a small boat with my father, while my mother and a different brother, not to be named, but younger than I and older than Bob, were fishing in another. A whoop, a holler and some very excited laughter poured across the lake. I said "He must have caught a big bass." My dad said, "Your mother must have fallen out of the boat."

My mom called into school again

Mom was always getting called into school. This time, in seventh grade my book review of Gulliver's Travels amounted to little more than "This is a Bakersque fantasy about an aberrant adult male and his fantasies of bondage and little boys." Mr. Baker was the assistant principal, in charge of discipline. The teacher attempted to get my mother to admonish me for my report. My mom told her, "I would never give him the satisfaction." We learned lot's of things after we became adults. So did my mom.

Bob is a natural driver

Mom was telling Paul and me that Bob, seven years my junior was a natural driver. Paul and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. "What are you two hiding?" We confessed that when little Bob was 12, three years earlier we used to let him drive on the country roads and eventually the highway, twelve miles to my brother's house. "You what? In my car? There is no insurance coverage on unlicensed drivers." Then, she laughed and said "You two are incorrigible."

Returning

United Airlines wanted more to change my flight than Spirit charged for a one way no notice fare. The Spirit website is atrocious. I attempted to reserve a seat on the evening flight but the site crashed so many times while trying to choose a "premium seat" (there are no free seats on any flight apparently) and paying extra for a single checked bag that by the time I was done they had changed the fare class. As a result I am flying out in the morning, hoping that the limousine service actually shows up on time. This will be the first time in thirty years that I didn't have a rental car or allow my mother to drive me at her insistence.

My older son, Karl will hopefully be joining me in May to get some new front teeth after a nasty incident between his face and a car. Mark, the younger son will probably be down in August. I'll be back in the states on the fifth of never.