Don’t despise your mother when she is old. (Proverbs 23:22)My family had dinner together yesterday. For some this is not big news, but for my family it is. For one thing we do not get together enough. For another, my mother is here with us for a couple of weeks.
It is good having her with us. She went through a lot of trouble getting here. She took a plane from my brother’s home in Delaware and went to three airports before it became apparent her tickets were going to the wrong Columbia. She was routed to NC rather than MO.
When they finally figured it out and went to get a ticket, the tickets to come from Washington, DC, to Columbia, MO, was going to over $1000. My brother decided to drive her here. 1100 miles. When he got here, he had supper with us and turned around and went back.
A long journey in anyone’s book.
Of course, when she got here, she had to show us her physical grace and fall, tearing her arm some. This necessitated a visit to the emergency room and 15 stitches in her arm.
But for now, we are calm.
I don’t see my mother as often as I would like, so the visits mean more, I guess.
But it is funny that with this being Memorial Day weekend, one of my strongest memories of my mother was in July of 1969. I will never forget the look on her face when she handed to me what many considered a death warrant: my draft notice. I was scared and she was scared. I would go in the army, go over to Vietnam and get shot getting off the plane and be dead.
But of course, obviously I didn’t die. I lived and it has been over four decades since that time.
My mother looks different, yet the same. Her quality is the same. She is white headed but so am I. She is slower, but so am I. She is our last surviving parent and the kids’ last grandparent on the Cliver side.
But we are having good conversations. It has been a little more than a year since my father passed away and she is at loose ends a bit with life. They were married for 63 years and celebrated their anniversary the day before he died last February.
I guess the best part is when she got to see her great grandson, her first and the only Cliver in the coming batch. We took a four generation picture today that I will treasure. Lots of pictures of her with the grandkids and our family together.
And I am glad she is here. It will probably be the last trip like this she will make. And we want to make the best of it.
I love her and am glad she is here. I just wish she could stay longer or lived closer.
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