Sunday, July 31, 2016

Wrinkled Knees (No! Really!!)

This political year has been a combination of my dream come true and my worst nightmare.  Who would have believed that Donald Trump would be the Republican Candidate for President of the United States of America?  And why hasn't anyone told him that a his hair is simply   Ridiculous.  And how does he get away with not releasing his taxes? This blob has become a broken record of Trumps inadequate preparation for anything other than TV host and bully.  It will take some discipline, but I'll try to move on.

In the category of  things your mother never told you, yesterday when I looked down, I saw that my knees were wrinkled. Everyone knows about the hanging skin under your arms, and the veins in your legs and arms, but wrinkled knees?  She also forgot to share her wisdom  about how to remember names. Actually she never remembered anyone's  name, and it never mattered. Once she decided what your name was, that's what it was.  It seems I have started to do the same thing. It doesn't matter how many times I have been told a name, it still happens. At which point, ‘darling’ or ‘honey’, come in handy.

She never told us about how to be stylish, because her sense of style embarrassed my brother.  For example, she always wore a fur coat to the supermarket, winter and summer -- with curlers in her hair. All my Aunts did the same thing, but because she was my mother I thought it was terrific.  One evening, I am not sure of the occasion, Tina put on all of mom’s bulky gold jewelry. She was covered, jutting gold in every direction. All of us thought it was hillarious, and my mother thought it was Perfect.  Even when I was young, I knew she set her own style, which she did not pass on to me, but Jordan got it.

The other amazing quality she had was getting people to take care of her. Don’t get me wrong, she took good care of my dad who was disabled, and that was a full time job, but she knew how to get people to take care of her. Whatever she wanted or needed her sisters or friends provided. Like when she played cards:  it was never at our house.  Someone else did the entertaining.  But she’d love to go out and have fun.  Whether it was cards, mahjong, or dancing, she loved it all, and she had to be the best. Even now everyone who remembers her says, she loved to dance, and won every contest.

It’s not her birthday or any somewhat related holiday, but when I looked at my knees I was surprised about the wrinkles there. For whatever reason that reminded me of a sentence from a Judith Viorst essay, when she says that, if your husband is late, you know he has either been hit by a truck, or he’s having an affair. And you pray he’s lying bloodied on the street.  You ask yourself, what does that have to do with Judith Viorst and the essay? It doesn’t but she has written other books about aging, and I didn’t want to go there.

Back  to my mother and politics: when I worked at the 1980 Convention as the Director of Security (Editor’s Note: the only woman EVER to have been Dir. of Security for a National Convention),  mom came for one evening.  She and her friend Cynthia sat with the President — of the United States.  It made me so happy to be able to show her what an important political person I had become.  She even had a room in the hotel that was strictly limited to Political VIP’s. She didn’t think they, or I, needed to pay for a whole night since it was so late, and they were only staying half the night.  OH NO. Instead, these two characters from N.J walked, in the middle of the night, to the bus station and took a bus back home.  They never told me they were leaving, so I figured they were hit by the same bus that didn’t hit my husband, and were lying dead on some NYC street.  The story goes on, but I won’t.  Suffice it to say, my mother loved Hillary. She ate at the White House Mess during the Clinton Administration, and hated Donald Trump on TV because, “who did he think he was”. That pretty much says it for so many of us.  We’re just sayin’…Iris

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