SERIOUSLY??!!

Whenever anyone looks at me aghast and exclaims, “Seriously!!? I always say yes.  I am always serious.  I wish it weren’t so, because serious gets so little attention these days.  At a party serious gets a polite nod and a very short conversation. In the family circle, serious gets an “Oh no, Mom, we are not up for a poetry reading!”

I was born serious.  Or at least I inherited it from my mother’s early years.  The woman who raised me (i.e. her “early years) fretted over whether I would drown during my swim lessons at the local YWCA.  She stood at the top of the stairs during my high school dates and called repeatedly, “Lorraine, it’s getting late.  You have school tomorrow.”  On a brighter note, she would warn me not to take out the trash or drive to the local Krogers because “it’s dark outside.” 

During her empty nest years, she read tomes like The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant, a ten-volume encyclopedia – for fun.  Then she started writing essays (all that knowledge had to go somewhere), and you can imagine that my sister and I were overjoyed to read her treatise on “What is Wrong with the World Today” in between chasing around our toddlers.

But then I had a different mother in her later years. She said things to me like, “You never really knew me.”  I yawned and thought, “What are you talking about, I lived with you for 22 years.”  She would interject wistfully into conversations on other topics, “You know, I used to go dancing every week; I loved to hike.”  Hmmm, yeah right.

“I knew how to fence.  I learned how to fly an airplane.  I was in the Civil Air Patrol during the War. I was a Nurses’ Aide and saved several people’s lives.”

What have you done with my mother!!  I screamed.

The tales continued to unfold, but my growing astonishment came from more than past stories.  She laughed.  She told jokes.  She could take down a whole room in laughter.  She smiled.  People universally smiled back at her.  And they repeated her one-liners to me.

What have you done with my mother? 

When we were at doctors’ appointments or on hospital junkets, she cheered up the whole staff, and sometimes I could hear the whispers and titters following us down the hallway.

One day she was in the hospital and the orderly tried to transfer her from the bed to the gurney for a trip to the CT scanner.  He bungled it and ended up laying on her.  She quipped unabashed:

 “Will you come back again later – it’s been a long time since I’ve had a man on top of me!”  She was 89.

Seriously!!!??

Mom, taking life seriously.