Category: In Which We Mock the Queen Mother

Were it not for the references to Falstaff beer I would never believe that my Dad – my stoic, emotionless, rational Dad – wrote three letters a day full of all the passion I have never heard from any man in my entire life. “I love you, I love you, I love you.” And then…

Back in December of 2017 I looked in the box marked “Mom correspondence” and read Mom’s letters. Somehow I skipped the letters sent from my soon-to-be stepfather, aka “Dad”. This new information from Dad’s letters all prompted me to check the dates and make a spreadsheet to track who did what to whom and when,…

I’ve been going through Mom’s old papers and correspondence. One thing she wrote was called “The Growing Old Part,” and now that I am too growing a little bit older, I read it with interest. She wrote the below musing to herself in 1984. She was born in 1934, so I guess she was a…

I don’t know if this is specific to my family, or my age, or my state, but I have had two family members who were in what were described as common-law marriages. One was my grandfather, the other was my tenuous connection to President Harding (second-worst president ever). After he divorced my maternal grandmother (the…

Late in her life my Mom began to correspond with cousins, step cousins, half cousins removed, and the like. In one letter she complained that her family kept secrets, and from the tea spilt in later letters it’s clear she was done with that. There was the secret of the chair shown above. I have…

So, the me you see recently is not the normal me. You have seen me giving myself the weight loss drugs, wearing the mouth-bright flashlight, applying the wigs, and considering the eyelashes. I usually don’t care that much about my appearance. But now that it has declined SO dramatically since I turned sixty, it seems…

One day in the fall of 1968, Mom, my brother and I went on a date downtown with Mom and her “new” boyfriend. (I use the quotes because he had originally been her old boyfriend, and then Mom got married to Jerry, then divorced from Jerry, and now this guy was back in the picture.)…

On several occasions (here and here) I have referred to Mom as “Mighty Leg.” Our family speculated that after the polio weakened her arms, her legs grew mighty to compensate. As proof, when I was a child, we played the Mighty Leg game. There wasn’t a lot of physical contact with Mom, because it wasn’t…

I recently learned from St. Louis Daily Photo that Bob Cassily, founder of the City Museum, was one of the people who helped capture the man who attacked the Pieta. The man who attacked the Pieta was named Lazlo Toth. That name was later adopted by Don Novello, aka Father Guido Sarducci, aka Lazlo Toth,…

I recently looked at my bullfrog wattle and I realized I now have Mom’s chin when she was 59. This was Mom’s life at the age I am now: 61. She had spent years supporting / spoiling a non-working husband who stayed up all night and slept all day. I’m there too. Her bladder decided…