Dear Mom

Dear Mom,

Today I was reminded of you. I was walking down the hall in the medical center. I turned a corner and immediately noticed the new wall paint. It was exactly the color of black raspberry ice cream, which was always your favorite flavor when we were growing up. What a terrible color for a medical center. But I smiled about the black raspberry ice cream and was thinking of you as I walked. Then I thought how last week I thought of you too. Jo was telling me how her kids love the books I gave them, especially the one about the hippos. I remember the hippo book, and how you used to read it to me. It had the word species in it, and I asked you what species meant. You said, "kind" and I thought how smart you were to know a fancy word like that. So I crossed out species and wrote "kind" above it - hippos were a unique "kind" of animal. And you know I treasured my books and it was a big deal for me to deface one. I loved when you read to me, and I sat closely or in your lap and had you all to myself. When you read to me, your breath always smelled like coffeestink. And the smell of your breath was a comfort to me because you were my mom and you knew what species meant and you read to me.

Then I thought about your mother. One of my favorite things about going to her house when I was small, was playing with those million-keys-on-a-string because some of the keys were blue and I had never seen blue keys before. From her estate sale, I got the skeleton key from that string and put it on my own key chain for years. And at dad's mother's, I remember the blue toilet water because that was the first time I had ever seen blue water in a toilet. I spent a lot of time thinking about why her toilet water was blue, but at our house it was clear. Or yellow. What would my grandmothers think if I told them this is what I remembered them for? 

So the point I am making here, is you can try all you want to "make memories" with your grandkids and take them to Hershey Park a million times, but they are probably going to remember you for something stupid like coffeestink or toilet water.