mom

This page is dedicated to all who have known and loved my mom and her stories, to those that would liked to have known her and to all of those who have helped me down that long road of grief.

My Mom

In Loving Memory of My Mom, Judy

March 13, 1939 - March 14, 1995

My mom. Anyone who knew her would say that she had the biggest heart in the world. No matter how mad she got at me during my nasty and rebellious adolescence, I never doubted her love for a moment. She believed in giving hugs and saying "I love you" on regular old days, just because. She sang the "I love you, I love you, a bushel and a peck" song to probably every kid that sat on the kitchen counter helping her make cookies. And that was a lot of kids because even when my sister and I were too big to sit on the counter, she'd borrow other people's kids. Mom loved to have fun and would rather be at Wrigley Field watching the Chicago Cubs play than anywhere else in the world. I remember summers when she drank suntea (Dad insists you can brew it in the closet, but Mom put it out in the sun anyway) and watched the Cubs on TV. I could tell from down the block whether they were winning or losing (and therefore whether it would be a good night to talk her into something I wanted) by her voice. She still made Easter baskets and Christmas stockings for me and my sister, even though we were old enough that she didn't have to. She bragged to the cashiers at the grocery store about my sister's babies, her precious grandsons, wearing sweatshirts that said "Grandma" and showing pictures of them to anyone who would look. After my rebellion as an adolescent, we had started to become much closer again and she sometimes hung out with me and my friends, going to bingo and dances with us, and usually stopping somewhere for hot chocolate after (we drank coffee, but she never drank it, saying that it would make her little and brown--and she was already little at only 4'11"). My mom was the kind of mom who danced and cried with me in the kitchen when we found out that I'd gotten accepted to my dream college (a miracle after the times when we wondered whether I would even graduate from high school), and who called me a lot while I was in college even though the phone bill was high and she swore my dad would cut her fingers off to keep her from dialing, and who sent care packages that included her homemade cookies. She was proud of me for doing well in college, and she told people about that, too. She loved to spread her happiness around and was never afraid of letting people see how much she loved us or how proud of us she was. I missed her while I was away at college, but we talked often, and I came home once in awhile, especially for the holidays. We always had so much fun. We never really argued or fought anymore, and I am grateful for that. How do I begin to describe this special woman in a way that people who've never met her would understand? Let me start by sharing some of the "vintage Judy stories" that bring laughter to my heart.

Gas Stations

Gas stations are fairly unspectacular places. Unless you've ever gone to one with Judy...

The Shell guy was pumping gas, cleaning the windows and all of the other regular stuff that they used to do, when suddenly things went wrong. Mom just started to pull out, and the guy who'd been pumping started yelling, "hey, lady, STOP!!" Mom, probably mumbling something obscene under her breath, stopped and looked at the guy like he was the one with a problem. It turned out that the nozzle was still in her tank and she was dragging the hose along behind her after being yanking it off the pump.

Another gas station story. I was about 12 years old and Mom was driving my first "boyfriend" home. Being at the awkward age, it was bad enough that she had to be driving us around, but it got worse when we pulled into the Mobil station. I mean we tried to pull in, didn't get close enough, pulled out, and tried again. I was mortified. But it wasn't over. It took at least 4 attempts pulling in, pulling out, turning around and pulling back in before Mom got close enough to the pump. When the nice Mobil guy came out to pump the gas he says "Is everything OK, ma'am?" I wanted to die, and my unseasoned little boyfriend had a look of bewilderment on his face.

Yet another gas station story. Mom was working mornings at a retail store 5 minutes from our house, but day after day she left really early, saying that she needed to get gas. We knew that there was something more to it than that because there was no way she could possibly need to leave an hour early every day to stop and get gas. My dad went to the Bob Evan's Restaurant (they have great biscuits and gravy and fried mush) and he got there just in time to see my mom and hear the waitress ask her "having the usual, Judy?" The daily fill up mystery was solved. One of the most bittersweet moments of Mom's memorial was when I was reading all of the cards on the flowers and saw that the Bob Evan's waitresses had sent a gorgeous arrangement.

Cooking with Judy

Mom was always baking something. I will always remember sitting on the counter "helping" her make cookies and cakes for special occassions or just because. The world knew when Judy was baking because there was always a flour handprint on each cheek of her butt. If you behaved (and even if you didn't), Mom would always let you lick the beaters and the bowl. A recipe that was supposed to make 2 dozen of something usually really only yielded about 10 because of all the picking that went on while baking. Christmas was always the grandest time for baking. "I'm getting nuttin' for Christmas," blaring in the background as Mom tried to make spritz Christmas cookies...you know, the kind you make with a cookie press? Every year she made them, and every year she would get mad when they didn't come out right. When they finally came out with something called a cookie gun to make the same cookies, she always said she wanted one so that she could shoot the @#%$ cookies. She never got one; probably because it was funnier to watch her yell at cookie dough.

Perhaps my family's favorite cooking with Judy story is the Pork Chop Story. My parent's belonged to a nice little church down the road, and every year they held a progressive dinner for the holidays (appetizers at one house, main course at the next, and dessert at yet another house). Mom was given a recipe to make the main course, pork chops (with apricots, I think...). She cooked for hours, and the pork chops in the oven were smelling great by the time the pastor and other members of the congregation arrived. Dinner was getting close as everyone stood around chatting and Mom went to take the pork chops out of the oven. Crash! Bang! And Mom yells tearfully for all these good church-goers and the pastor to hear "Well now the God-damn pork chops are on the God-damn floor!" I don't remember whether she scooped them up and served them anyway or whether they just made do with the side dishes, but I do remember that almost every Sunday after that when she would invite the rest of the family over for a roast everyone said that instead of a roast, they wanted her to make the God-damn pork chops. = )

Judy does Christmas

I can't imagine that Christmas ever even existed before Mom was born. I have known people who get all excited about Christmas, but I have never know anyone who gets quite as excited as Judy. Besides the story about flour handprints on her butt while baking Christmas cookies and yelling at the dough when it doesn't form right, here are some of her Christmas stories.

I don't even know if I was born when this happnened, and I suspect it happened more than once... Judy was like a little kid that couldn't stand to wait until Christmas to see what was in those boxes under the tree with her name on it. Of course she did the lift and shake thing that I inherited, but evidently that only got her curiosity up higher, so she went ahead and unwrapped the present well before Christmas morning. She cleverly decided that she would simply re-wrap it, and no one would know. Like a lot of Mom's clever plans, though, it didn't go exactly the way it was planned. Dad is a very meticulous gift wrapper insisting that patterns match up so that you can't even see the line (I didn't get that gene...), but Mom's gift wrapping jobs weren't quite as perfect. If only I had been there to see the look on Mom's face when she saw the look on Dad's face when he looked under the tree and saw that the box had been re-wrapped! I would bet money that even though she was caught, Mom played dumb, insisted she didn't even know what he was talking about and called him a name.

Judy is in charge of all things Christmas (other than the Christmas lights that Dad likes to do his way). She arranges the presents under the tree (probably so she can shake them!), hands them out on Christmas morning in a position as close as she can get to being seated under the tree, she bakes the cookies and makes everyone sing Christmas songs, she cooks the dinner that includes one batch of black biscuits and one forgotten side dish (everything else is perfect and delicious), and she is the final word on the stockings hung by the chimney with care (with each individual item inside wrapped). So, one year my sister bought me tickets to see the Nutcracker in Chicago, and she put them in my stocking before bed on Christmas Eve. As I finished going through my stocking on Christmas morning, my sister wondered why they hadn't turned up in there. This was followed by Mom in the garage going through the garbage to find the missing tickets. Evidently Judy had re-arranged everything in the stocking and had mistaken them for just any old paper and tossed them. Never mess with Santa's duties.

Dieting

Mom started every diet on a Monday. There were a few times when they actually lasted longer than the Wednesday following the Monday, but a lot that didn't. So one day a cop sees a car pulled over on the side of the road and wonders if the woman is having car trouble or something, and he stops, gets out of his car and walks up to the car. Inside he sees the "emergency" that made the woman have to pull over. The same night there was a clear carton of eclairs sitting on our kitchen counter. There were three eclairs, and one stripe of chocolate with nothing under it. When dad asked about it, Mom denied that there was ever another eclair there. After all, she was on a diet. The box just came that way. As always, you could tell that there was more to the story by the way Mom was trying not to grin, and, eventually, the story came out. Mom had been on her diet, and she had gone to the grocery store. The eclairs were looking really good, so she bought them and loaded them and all of the other groceries into the trunk of her car. It was such a long ride home (what, 5 - 10 minutes?), and she started thinking about the eclairs and just couldn't stand it anymore, so she pulls over to the side of the road, goes to the trunk and gets the box of eclairs. Still sitting on the side of the road, she's eating one when the cop walks up to the window to find out that nope, it's not really a real problem, just Mom having a little emergency eclair attack.

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