Sometimes we forget the private lives NTR
Sort of Tiger related because we all arrive at this point at some point in our lives.
We get caught up in sports and rivalries and differences and sometimes show lack of civility. It's good to stop everyone once in a while and remember that players and coaches and sports writers and commentators are people like everyone else and they have the same celebrations and losses as we do. It's hard losing your mom at any age.
From The Memphian by G Calkins
Before Mom became a prison doctor, she worked at the local psychiatric hospital. She wasn’t your ordinary doctor. She used to take her two white standard poodles on rounds with her. The administrators didn’t love it, but the patients sure did.
One day, Mom learned that one of her elderly patients couldn’t be discharged to live on his own. Hospital administrators had discovered that the patient did not have a bed in his new place. The rules said a patient could not be discharged into a home without a bed. So Mom borrowed a truck from the landscaper, backed it up to the hospital, loaded an old bed that she found in the hospital basement, and delivered it to the elderly man’s apartment. The patient was quickly — and happily — discharged.
That was Mom. She had an endless supply of what Dad liked to call “get up and go.” She was one of the early woman physicians in this country and the mother of nine children. She presided over an astonishing menagerie through the years — one that changed to fit her children’s interests — which included Arabian horses, standard poodles, Dorset sheep, chickens, ducks, guinea pigs, cockatiels, a monkey, a raccoon and a tortoise named Happy.
Calkins: How did my 96-year-old mother celebrate her vaccination? She went to Disney, of course
Last Monday, I got a call that Mom might not make it to the weekend. So after my radio show, I drove 14 hours to Buffalo. But there she was, sitting at her usual spot at the kitchen table. We watched the movie Seabiscuit; That was the last time we were able to get Mom out of bed.
“Last Monday, I got a call that Mom might not make it to the weekend. So after my radio show, I drove 14 hours to Buffalo. But there she was, sitting at her usual spot at the kitchen table. We watched the movie ‘Seabiscuit.’ That was the last time we were able to get Mom out of bed.” (Calkins Family photo)
So it’s almost impossible to believe that she’s gone. I had already planned to go back to Buffalo, New York, this past weekend to celebrate her birthday on Friday, Oct. 8. The cards and cakes had started to flood into the red brick farmhouse where I grew up. But shortly after midnight, Mom took her leave. Maybe five minutes into her birthday. She must have decided that 97 years was enough.
So I hope you’ll indulge me writing about her one last time. As I’ve mentioned before, she’s the reason I have this gig. When I was hospitalized with leukemia in the third grade, she would lug a big typewriter into my hospital room and type up stories as I dictated. They weren’t particularly good stories. I remember one about a saber-toothed tiger and a boy named “Little Bear.” But that’s when I first began to think of myself as a writer.
Later, when I took an ill-advised detour into the legal profession, Mom sent me a letter — I still have it — that said: “I think it’s great to try something besides law which I consider a profession of trouble makers. Why don’t you go to journalism school?”
Mom didn’t care much about money or prestige. She liked people. She particularly liked supporting people. She loved to tell a story — it was almost certainly apocryphal — about a little girl who came home from school one day and announced she was in the school play. No, the little girl wasn’t a princess or a knight or even a tree. “I’m a clapper,” said the girl.
Mom was a helluva clapper. In addition to raising nine kids of her own, she hosted three international exchange students for a full year. She served as president of the local school board. When family friends were killed in a car accident one tragic Easter weekend, she took in their three children until school was out.
Mom fixed hamburger casseroles for the Night People. She trucked our sheep and donkeys to local churches for their Christmas pageants. She once met a man in a nursing home who had a bird feeder outside his window but nobody to refill it. She returned to fill the bird feeder herself, every single week.
My sister Lucy tells the story about the time she joined Mom at the psychiatric hospital, back when Lucy was in middle school. They stopped to see a teenage patient who was catatonic, just staring straight ahead. So Mom started chatting cheerfully, asking the patient if she wanted something, maybe a soda? The patient kept staring straight ahead.
“OK, would you prefer a Coke or an orange Crush?” asked Mom, undeterred by the silence. “An orange Crush, yes?”
Mom gave Lucy a few quarters and told her to go get the patient an orange Crush from the vending machine.
Later, on the drive home, Mom asked Lucy if the patient drank the soda. Lucy reached into her pocked, pulled out the quarters, and said the vending machine was out.
“You mean, she’s still waiting for her soda?” Mom said.
She turned the car around, stopped at a convenience store and delivered the promised orange Crush.
Mom boosted people who needed boosting. It was as simple as that. If she could help someone, she would help someone. And not let much stand in her way.
“Mom boosted people who needed boosting. It was as simple as that. If she could help someone, she would help someone. And not let much stand in her way.”
She was both generous and intimidating. One of my sisters once asked Mom if she was truly happy. “I don’t have time to think about it, I have to go feed the horses,” was her response.
Mom understood you have a better shot at happiness if you don’t spend too much time fretting about it, if you focus on people other than yourself. Do that, and you just might find joy in every day.
She loved tomato sandwiches with mayonnaise, summers in Michigan, Dick Francis mysteries and the good stiff drinks my father would make. She loved riding through the woods and fields on her horses (even in hunting season, when she would think she was taking real precautions by hollering out “Don’t shoot!”) and she loved sharing ice cream with her dogs. She would take those dogs everywhere, even to her children’s college graduations. Of course, poodles are smart dogs.
And then Mom got old. In a way that was hard to bear. She couldn’t make a pot of coffee or change her clothes. She couldn’t even turn herself over in bed. Us kids thought Mom would have bowed out a decade ago. Turns out she was way too tough for that. Mom was given pain pills every few hours to cope with devastating arthritis. But she would never complain, even after Dad died a year and a half ago. She would sit in her chair and read her mysteries. She would look out the kitchen window and watch the birds visit feeders that someone else had to fill.
Calkins: What happens when you take your 98- and 94-year-old parents to Disney? Magic, of course
Last Monday, I got a call that Mom might not make it to the weekend. So after my radio show, I drove 14 hours to Buffalo. But there she was, sitting at her usual spot at the kitchen table. We watched the movie “Seabiscuit.”
That was the last time we were able to get Mom out of bed. You may know how the final days can go. By the time the end came, it was a blessed relief. My sister Sally was quietly singing, “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder” at the moment Mom took her leave.
My mother loved Memphis because Memphis is where her son found happiness. Isn’t that what every mother wants? She got The Commercial Appeal by mail for more than two decades. She could talk about Penny Hardaway and the Grizzlies and whatever new baby animals were born at the zoo.
On the drive back home Saturday, I stopped a couple of times and wrote Mom’s obituary. The funeral home always asks where memorial donations should be sent. Mom would just like you to go out of your way to be helpful to someone. Then share an ice cream with your dog.
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