I was going to take a week off over Christmas but I woke up this morning at 0530 with words bouncing around in my head looking for a way out. So rather than lying in bed composing in my head I’ve moved to the computer.  Besides, after way too much snow shoveling yesterday, my back feels better vertical in a chair than horizontal in bed.

Yesterday was my mom’s last day of work.  As of today she has joined me in the ranks of the retired.  I think she felt a little funny still working while she had a retired son but I think, at almost 79, she’s ready to relax a little and enjoy grandkids and great-grandkids.  My mom has worked at Target for at least 15 years.  She doesn’t work out on the floor with the customers, but in the back office with all of the administrative functions that are a part of any business. She’s the face every employee sees when they punch in.  She’s the store mom/grandma/counselor and I know she will be missed.

Mom has had a lot of bosses over the years.  Retail tends to be a revolving door of personnel both on the floor and in management and, like all organizations, there are good bosses and there are bad bosses.  In her case, the good ones recognized her as a valuable, experienced asset who cared about people and getting the job done but the bad ones couldn’t see beyond the grey hair and couldn’t deal with someone older, and wiser, working for them.  she did, however, have one boss that had a very interesting link to our family.

Up to the day I walked out the door to go on active duty I had only been to see one doctor, ever.  His name was Dr. Wallace.  He brought all of my siblings into the world and, I’ll have to confirm this with mom, I think he was her doctor, as a child, as well.  He was ancient when I was a kid and I can vividly remember his office.  The smell, the racks of well worn magazines, the ticking of the clock on the wall as you quietly waited your turn, his enormous hands.  Dr. Wallace was my mom’s bosses grandfather.

When you’re a kid you think doctors know everything.  Especially when you’re sick and just want to feel better. So we all thought Dr. Wallace was a medical genius.  After all, none of us died.  We’d go to him, he’d tell us what to do, we’d get better.  How can you argue with those results.  In the spring of 1975, (I was finishing my freshman of college) unbeknownst to me, my mom wasn’t feeling well.  She had been gaining weight, feeling tired and she was worried.  So she dragged herself down to old Dr. Wallace’s office who proceeded to tell her to go on a diet and get more exercise.  As if raising four kids ages 12-20 wasn’t enough exercise!  So she dutifully doubled the size of the garden to get more exercise and started eating less.  After two months or so there was no improvement so back she went and his advice was more of the same.  This time she protested a little stronger.  She thought she had felt like this before and dieting hadn’t help then either.  He dismissed her self-diagnosis and off she went for another month of dieting and exercise.  Finally, she did the unthinkable, she went to a different doctor, a specialist, an OB/GYN who immediately diagnosed her condition as a severe, but curable, case of pregnancy.  By that time she was 6 months along and dieting and heavy labor wasn’t really the appropriate treatment for her condition.

I still clearly remember the day my brother Tim and I walked in the house, after returning from a week of performing out of state, and mom and dad asking us to sit down so they could tell us “something important”. It can be traumatic enough for teenagers thinking that your parents do “it” but you have even a harder time getting your head around pregnancy at “her age”.

Mom ended up having to spend her last two months in bed and by that time I was a sophomore, engineering major taking 22 credit hours, living at home, doing the family grocery shopping and all of the billing for my dad’s company.  On October 19th, it was a Sunday, my little sister Jody was born.  You’d think that it would be “inconvenient” to have a baby in a small house full of teenagers, but the opposite was true.  Peg says that I’m a “baby guy”.  She doesn’t mean that I act like a baby, although I do sometimes, but that I love babies.  And she’s right.  I learned a lot from my baby sister.  How to change diapers.  How to rock a baby to sleep.  How to make a baby giggle.  How to read the same book twenty times in a row just because she wants to hear it again. How to smile when a baby cries and not scowl at the frantic, embarrassed mother. Brotherhood was great training for fatherhood which was great training for unclehood and eventually grandfatherhood.

Three years later, Jul 1978, Tim and I jumped into my 1966 Studebaker Commander for the long drive to pilot training in Del Rio, TX.  Looking forward to the adventure ahead but knowing that what I would miss most was my baby sister.

I can’t wait to meet Charlotte Ann!  3 1/2 weeks (but who’s counting?).