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 Remembering My Mother NSRModerators: Jump to page : 1 Now viewing page 1 [25 messages per page] | |
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dex armstrong |
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COMSUBBBS Posts: 3202 Location: Alexandria, Virginia | Subject: Remembering My Mother NSR My Mom died April 6,1950....I was nine. April 6 has always been a tough day for me. Since my Dad was overseas shooting Third Reich personnel, she was all I had....She was my Mom...my cuts and scrapes bandager....my Kool-Aid mixer....the woman who made me take cod liver oil....the lady who hauled me to church and Sunday school every Sunday....the person who sewed on buttons, patched pants and darned sock holes....she smoked Luckies, listened to Jack Benny, Amos and Andy and the Hit Parade....She was a friend of Dinah Shore...really....she read Life, Time, Colliers and Readers Digest....She believed in Jesus Christ and Franklin Roosevelt...never figured out, in which order. She sang Irish songs and all the popular songs all the time...well not all of the time. She never figured out how to sing when she was hanging clothes on the line and had the odd clothespin held in her teeth. Like damn near all women at the time, she was extremely modest....when she hung out the wash she made a kind of shield out of sheets, pillow cases, towels, dresses, slacks and all the other stuff...to hide her bras, panties, and girdles from passing vehicle observation, pedestrians and our nosey as hell mailman. Being Irish she force fed me lamb...every Sunday...I hated lamb...There was a picture of Jesus on the front of my Sunday School book...He was holding a lamb...I used to look at that lamb and wonder what kind of misguided, warped sonuvabitch would kill and eat that cute little guy. Besides, they were greasy, smelled weird and required a half ton of mint jelly to kill the taste. In the summer I used to raise the window across from where I sat and when my Mother got up to go to the kitchen, I would toss my lamb...Brussel sprouts...rooty-beggers...and asparagus out the window, to be retrieved later and placed in the garbage can. My Mother once found a Brussel sprout in her tulip bed...looked at it and said absent mindedly,"Wondwer how that got here?" My Mother wasn't much of a Dick Tracy....My Mother once spanked me for calling Tooky Duffy a "dumbass bastard" (which in truth was an understatement.) She also didn't like the hillbilly term, very popular in East Tennessee and one that could reverse the pump action of an English teachers heart..."It don't make me no nevermind."...meaning it was a subject of complete indifference. Every hayseed, clodhopper and grammer school kid from Knoxville to Atlanta knew exactly what it meant...and wondered why it made the veins stand out on adult necks. With my Dad overseas and recognizing that certain things needed to be taken care of in a lads life she bought me my first harmonica (Marine Band)...my first Barlow knife and BB gun....(She had been the only girl in the Andrews family and grew up with five brothers....and she was one hell of a rifle shot...and taught me.) She caught me playing doctor-patient with Nancy Knight and didn't think Nancy needed to be buck nekkit and told her to take her sundress and undies off the lawn mower handle, get dressed and go home. I got a blistering and told that my medical career had just ciome to all stop....my nekkit girl anatomical research had terminated...no more game playing involving clothes removal or playing anywhere that sunshine didn't hit you. After that me n' Sammy could only continue our nekkit lady advanced studies sitting on an elevated jack pine limb looking in his Mom's window when she got ready to take a bath...looking at Pete McCalls dad's medical books (Pete's dad was a general practitioner) and turning to the lady's underwear section of the Sears Roebuck catalog. In the 1940's there was no such thing as sex education...you picked up information where you could, cobbled it together and ended up with something like a mystical Hindu religion that made absolutely no sense....and involved stuff that you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, your Mother would never let be done to her. And you had problems with the concept of babies getting out through a woman's belly button. You financed clandestined tobacco purchases by collecting pop bottles along the side of the highway...Mr. Zahnd gave you a penny each for them...he got two...It had something to do with "brokerage". My Mom would have things called cocktails and highballs...it was some kind of whiskey drinking for women. Ned down at the barbershop just did swigs out of a flat pint and Mistur Creeder who swept out the school use to sneak shots into his Double-Cola bottle. My Mother gave me a quarter a week to keep the Iron Fireman in the basement filled with coal after shoveling out the clincker...that combined with the shared collection plate money from the fifty-fifty arrangement I had with God...If he could do all that miracle stuff, hell he could make all the dimes he needed...so he let me split the money before licking the envelope. I often wonder, if by some real honest-to-God miracle I was to end up at Saint Peters desk and he checks the book...just how much I owe, the Mite Box and collection plate fund....just the compound interest from 1946 is gonna be hell. If I was a good boy when she took me shopping and window looking in downtown Chattanooga, she would take me to the dime store to get a tin soldier and a limemade. The St. Elmo bus picked up people in front of Kresses Five and Dime and the alley beside the store had big ole galvenized garbage cans full of squeezed lime rinds and 50% of all the flies in North America. I liked the bus because it had all these really neat signs...Doublemint Gum with Pat Butram...Smokey the Bear....Really beautiful women smoking Camels....Kiwi shoe polish....Coke....Pepsi...5th Avenue candy bars...Ah the power of advertising. My Mother and I listened to the ballgames on the radio...The Chattanooga Lookouts..."Rootin' Tootin" Junior Wooten...(Earl Wooten Jr.) and sometimes we'd go to Engle Stadium and watch a game. At Engle Stadium they had mosquitoes that could fly away with a fan every now and then. I loved my Mother and it broke my heart when she died and left me a stupid damn kid, with no life experience, all alone and with no hand to hold...or read to me...tuck me in....Hell I would have drunk that goddam cod-liver oil by the quart, eaten Brussel sprouts, lamb and stopped sneaking cigarettes, if God had returned her to where she belonged. DEX | ||
| Jim M. |
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Great Sage of the Sea Posts: 877 | Subject: Remembering my father Dex, I do know what you mean and feel the same way... about my father. May 9/10 is a day of great sadness and great joy for me.. May 9 I lost my father to that bastard f*****g disease called cancer.. and on May 10, I welcomed my little girl Stephanie into the world. I was a human ping-pong ball during that time.. numbed from the loss of my father..yet on top of the world holding my little girl (and she was little..six weeks early...). I know my dad is watching over me... with the way certain things have happened I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't kicking a** and taking names and making things happen for my family the way they have. One thing I do.. whenever I go on a cruise on the SS JOHN W BROWN or work an airshow or fly anywhere.. I keep my father's dog tags with me.. kind of keeps me close to him. The one thing that I wish for... knowing I'll never get it... is for my father to hold my "little angel" just once... but I think he is holding her in some way... | ||
| dex armstrong |
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COMSUBBBS Posts: 3202 Location: Alexandria, Virginia | Subject: RE: Remembering My Mother NSR It is sad that a tribute to my Mother ended up as a mechanism for bitter people to vent. She was not like that...and would not have appreciated it. I would have deeply appreciated it, if the criminal aspect of the memories others had been confined to a seperate posting. Robert D. Armstrong | ||
| John Bay |
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| Old Salt Posts: 359 Location: Saco, Maine | Subject: RE: Remembering My Mother NSR It is called "life", Dex. | ||
| Corabelle |
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COMSUBBBS Posts: 2561 Location: Rapid City, SD | Subject: RE: Remembering My Mother NSR What? I mean, what the hell? Cora Edited by Corabelle 2008-04-22 7:40 PM | ||
| Donald L. Johnson |
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Great Sage of the Sea Posts: 602 Location: Visalia, Ca. | Subject: RE: Remembering my father Jim M. - 2008-04-22 6:29 AM Dex, I do know what you mean and feel the same way... about my father. May 9/10 is a day of great sadness and great joy for me.. May 9 I lost my father to that bastard f*****g disease called cancer.. and on May 10, I welcomed my little girl Stephanie into the world. I was a human ping-pong ball during that time.. numbed from the loss of my father..yet on top of the world holding my little girl (and she was little..six weeks early...). I know my dad is watching over me... with the way certain things have happened I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't kicking a** and taking names and making things happen for my family the way they have. One thing I do.. whenever I go on a cruise on the SS JOHN W BROWN or work an airshow or fly anywhere.. I keep my father's dog tags with me.. kind of keeps me close to him. The one thing that I wish for... knowing I'll never get it... is for my father to hold my "little angel" just once... but I think he is holding her in some way... Shipmate, my sources on the Staff of the Supreme Commander tell me "Count On It". "And when I die, and when I'm gone, there'll be one child born, In our world, to carry on, to carry on." Blood, Sweat, & Tears | ||
| Hugh |
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Senior Crew Posts: 160 Location: Hillsboro, OR | Subject: RE: Remembering My Mother NSR I will always miss my DAD - even if he was unreasonably stupid when I was 16 ... I'm profoundly grateful to the man who wrote his obituary DRAWING LESSONS FROM MILITARY MIGHT OF THE PAST 50 YEARS After formulating the laws of Athens, the mighty Solon left for a period of years and then returned. Procession was given in his honor. The first procession was that of older men with bowed backs and feeble step. The banner above their heads said: “We have protected the state.” “Yes,” said Solon, “those were glorious days for Athens but they are gone.” A second procession of men in middle life carried the banner: “We protect the state.” “Yes,” said Solon, “but what will become of Athens when you are no longer her defenders?” The came the vigorous step of young manhood with a banner bearing the inscription: “We will protect the state.” “Praised be the gods,” shouted Solon, “the state is safe.” Brig. Gen. William Lee Smith, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired), died on July 2, after a long and painful illness. I cannot pretend to have known him particularly well or long, but his passing, nevertheless, had a special meaning for me. I shared two of his three wars (Korea and Vietnam) and knowledge that the ranks are thinning is bound to put one in a contemplative mood. I remember hearing someone ask the general once what his worst experience as a Marine has been. Bill Smith's normally twinkling eyes flashed, as if anything in his long love affair with the corps could possibly be deemed “worst.” “I was shot and I froze,” he said, after a moment's reflection. He then turned away to pursue another conversation. That was all I ever heard him say about his Korean War experience, though he certainly must have had a lot to tell. In the terrible Korean winter of 1950-51, while still a young man in his 20s, Bill Smith was caught up in the First Marine Division's agonizing retreat from the Chosin Reservoir. The Chinese Red Army, streaming across the Yalu River in force, threatened to envelop and destroy Gen. Douglas MacArthur's entire army. Somehow, Bill Smith made it out, though many did not. For the rest of his life he bore the scars and the pain of that awful experience. “I was shot and I froze.” Unsaid was that he did it for his country and would willingly do it again. Korea is now almost a forgotten war, though a monument to those who fought and died there may soon be dedicated in Washington. The Vietnam Memorial, its wall stretching like a black scar across the Washington Mall, has long since been built and is hugely visited, both by those who served in and those who protested the war (a phenomenon interesting, psychologically, in itself). Korea, though, somehow slipped through he cracks. Perhaps we ignored it, as a nation, because of its unsatisfying conclusion, compared to the overwhelming military victory achieved in Bill Smith's first war, the one against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. To many Americans, the Korean War was at best a draw. To some, enthusiasts for Gen. MacArthur (“In war there is no substitute for victory”), it was a national humiliation, a distressing example of what can happen when politicians, rather than generals, formulate strategy and tactics. South Korea was saved, however, and has become an economic powerhouse. A precarious peace has been preserved on the Korean peninsula, in no small measure because of the continued presence of thousands of American troops. (One cannot say the same for our former ally, the Republican of Vietnam.) What lessons can we draw from the past 50 years? It is fashionable to say that America's moral authority and free market ideology have had most to do with preventing another and even more cataclysmic world war in this second half of the 20th century, that these are the things that have kept the wars we have engaged in “small.” I would suggest another reason, and it has to do with America's armed might. Where we have been challenged, in Korea, in Vietnam and in the Gulf, I conclude that it was because of a perceived weakness of, our political will to meet our responsibility, not because of any doubt as to our military ability to do so. In the more than 2,500 years since the Greek lawgiver Solon made the remarks quoted at the beginning of this piece, older generations have always voiced anxiety about the abilities and the intentions of those to whom the torch, and the sword, must inevitably be passed. This is particularly true in our own time, I think, when all of the great democracies seem to be having difficulty filling the ranks of their armies and navies. In America's 220 years, however, our sons and daughters have never failed us, nor do I think they ever will. Bill Smith, R.I.P. | ||
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