That it was before the era of "play-dates" and hyper-vigilence, so my brothers and I could wander pretty much wherever in the neighborhood or ride our bikes out in the woods and pretend we were intrepid explorers to our hearts' content. Yet no matter how far away we were, it always seemed we were within range of mom's suppertime call of time to go home.
That we told stories and played lots of games as a family when we were growing up - Yahtzee, checkers, Parcheesi, Uno. They're not as flashy as video games, but I think there's something more social and interactive about them, so that I'm glad we had that as quality family time.
That my mom indulged my reluctance to swallow pills when I was a kid, and when she'd give me an aspirin, she'd crush it up in between two spoons, then add a little sugar and water to the powder so that I could swallow it as a kind of liquidey concoction. I think I tended toward hypochondria diva-ness when I was a kid, and for some reason I'll never forget one time when I was absolutely convinced I was in the throes of some sickness, and mom sat me at the kitchen table and proceeded to tell me a story; I don't remember what it was anymore, but that wasn't what was important. What was a take-to-heart lesson was that after 10 minutes or so of listening to her, I stopped coughing and blowing my nose and moaning about how sick I was, and little while after that she paused her story and asked, "so, how are you feeling?" It was a bona fide epiphany to suddenly realize I felt quite fine! I hadn't been coughing or blowing my nose or feeling terrible for a while! And then we talked about the difference between really suffering from something, and suffering from something a person can work herself up to believe just in her head, and how the power of distraction can be put to work to help with both.
That my dad was really big on being self-reliant, so he taught me a lot of stuff. He was a sub-contractor, and worked on prettying up people's houses, and he'd take me to work with him in the summers where I learned how to paint and wallpaper. I learned about all kinds of tools and the importance of keeping an orderly workspace and for goodness sake to put things back where you found them. I never got to the point of monkeying up on a ladder and hanging on with one hand and foot while painting the trim on a third story home exterior like he could. But it did instill in me, as I went about it my own cautious way, the motto I carry to today: that I can do whatever a grown man can, just maybe not as fast. I also worked on my old '67 Chevy Impala with him and learned how to change a tire, change the oil, take apart, fix and reassemble a carburetor, replace a U-joint, fix brakes, replace a head gasket, change spark plugs, that sugar + Dawn dishwashing detergent gets the grease off your hands real good, etc. etc. Even though some of those skills have gone the way of the dinosaur (like fixing a carburetor), I still maintain the general attitude that if a situation arises that requires the use of tools or a ladder or taking things apart and putting them back together again, I can do it. My goal one day is to get a 1960s-era Camaro to rebuild.
That, even though I didn't glom onto them quite like I did to the use of power-tools, I grew up in a home where my mom did all these great things that at the time I thought were a product of living on the cheap, but today are all about living wholesomely. We hung our laundry out to dry. We often kept a vegetable garden. We'd shop at the local farmers market, and mom would buy a whole bunch of whatever and take it home and can it or preserve it (I'll never forget the times of shredding all that cabbage and then having containers around of it fermenting its way down into sauerkraut!). She baked her own bread. We bought our milk from a local dairy farmer, and used the cream to churn our own butter (but we never figured out how to extract all the milk, so it was always a little, um, leaky). She sewed. She ironed - EVERYTHING, it seemed. And she tried - though I was usually a uncooperative student (I liked being a grease monkey better) - to teach me all about the same. But as I've matured and the appeal of her sorts of activities is greater, I'm able to embrace them more readily than I might have had I never been in contact with them in the first place.
Thanks, mom and dad!
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