Thursday, November 23, 2000
Independent Thanksgiving - To LTF
I'm spiffing Mom up today and taking her to the Ramada Inn Thanksgiving Buffet for dinner. She's very excited. She loves to people watch (which is why she loves to eat out) and I promised her an unlimited amount of time at table today. I told her I'd fight off the management if they hinted that we'd been there too long and I will. Last night she said, "I'm glad everyone left the state for Thanksgiving. We can always see family. I'd rather watch everybody else."
I love the unsentimentality of old age. This summer when one of my nieces had my mother's first great-grandchild MCS (a new grandmother by virtue of this child) talked about how this birth was "a gift" to my mother, and maybe it is. When the new father posted an impossible number of pictures of the infant on the internet and MCS sent me the URL I asked Mom if she wanted to see them. She sighed and said, "No, you've seen one baby, you've seen 'em all."
There are lots of chores connected with my mother that I don't do well; housecleaning for one, and keeping up with the tremendously complicated network of paper, especially the money paper, that surrounds her life for another. There is, though, one thing I do better than anyone else in our family: Without expectations, I sit back and enjoy the show. She's a natural.
I love the unsentimentality of old age. This summer when one of my nieces had my mother's first great-grandchild MCS (a new grandmother by virtue of this child) talked about how this birth was "a gift" to my mother, and maybe it is. When the new father posted an impossible number of pictures of the infant on the internet and MCS sent me the URL I asked Mom if she wanted to see them. She sighed and said, "No, you've seen one baby, you've seen 'em all."
There are lots of chores connected with my mother that I don't do well; housecleaning for one, and keeping up with the tremendously complicated network of paper, especially the money paper, that surrounds her life for another. There is, though, one thing I do better than anyone else in our family: Without expectations, I sit back and enjoy the show. She's a natural.
