The Sparrow

On Sunday she would have been ninety, but God had other plans for her. She has been gone almost four months from this earth and I miss her dearly. However, the body cannot last forever. When I look back over the time that she was here she must have seen so many horrible, fantastic, and wonderful things. She was around for Lindbergh and the flight across the Atlantic, WWII, and the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She took a ferry for the fair at Treasure Island. In her lifetime she was able to travel by train, propeller airplane, jet plane, and helicopter.

Although she did not quite understand the change in technology. She listened to records on her Grandma's Victrola and later she had a hi-fi. She did not know the purpose of a boom box or an iPod. When I was young we had to a crank up our telephone to get an operator because we had a party line. When we moved to California we had a regular phone and no party line. A cell phone was something that Mom never longed for in her life. She first typed on a manual typewriter and then an electric one. She could never learn how to master a computer. However, she did love to look at pictures of her great-grandchildren stored on her Granddaughter's iPhone.

When I think back on her life my Mom was not a thing oriented person. She did not need things to make herself happy. The thing that made her happy was her family. Dinner was always ready before Daddy came home from work. We were always clean and well fed. For her, that was the most important thing that a wife could do. She spent hours trying, unsuccessfully, to make ladies out of her daughters who really liked running instead of sitting still. We did not fit the mold for the girls of our era. Poofy dresses were itchy forms of torture that we were forced to wear on special occasions. We wanted to wear jeans and play with the neighbor's goats.

After Dad died, we moved to California and Mom still clung to the possibility that we could be transformed into ladies. Etiquette lessons and then dancing lessons were supposed to turn the country girls into debutantes. No luck!! Even though television showed that girls were supposed to wear dresses and act helpless neither one of us was willing to act weak in front of a boy.

I will never forget when my Aunt found out that I had actually dared to beat a young man who was my date in bowling. She said he would never ask me out again. Well, she was wrong, he married me. My sister was one of the first women to work for PG&E as part of their work crew. She learned how to use a jack hammer and climb a pole. She was doing very unladylike things. The sixties were a time when women chose to break the mold. Neither my Aunt nor Mom quite understood the concept of the "glass ceiling" even though my Aunt was a businesswoman all her life and Mom had to support us as a secretary. However, Mom was proud that my sister and I were the first to go to college and finish with a degree.

And even though she may have been very Victorian in many of her practices, she was a big supporter of Hillary Clinton. She was so disappointed when she decided not to continue running for President. She felt that Gay marriage was just fine, what mattered most of all was that two people loved each other. Mom even supported the use of medical marijuana. After watching her own sister die of cancer of the jaw she knew what pain looked like and did not want anyone to suffer. Yes, my Mom was a very wise woman who learned many lessons in her lifetime. The lessons she taught us are more valuable than any degree. Love your family, wish no harm to anyone, and if you think there is no God look at a sparrow because Man could never create anything so intricate.