Happy Birthday, Mom

Today would be my poor, dead mother's birthday. She'd be something like 90, had she not died a decade or so ago. Funny how I can name the day and year my father died (granted it was a much more recent event, and I was more or less sitting there, watching it, but still...) and not even begin to come up with the year Mom died. It happened in late May/early June, but beyond that, I'm at loss.

I had attended the White House Correspondents' Dinner in May that year and swung by the ancestral home before heading back to New York. She looked horrible--truly horrible. A week or so later, the phone rang too early in the morning for anything good to be happening on the other end of the line, and she was gone.

It always annoyed her that her birthday fell so close to Christmas. Ever since she was a girl she'd figured she was getting short shrift. But the Redskins are playing the Cowboys today, and she would have liked that. Although she would have not have liked it if, as expected, the Cowboys prevail. Her loathing of Roger Staubach was palpable. She could barely say the man's last name without a sneer. Sometimes bits of spittle would come out of her mouth as she talked about the man. Hated Tom Landry too.

God bless her.