My Mom

My dad was an aerospace engineer; my mom (who died last Sunday) was a "home maker" -- the mom-est mom ever. My dad knew, and knew how to do, everything: fix a sink, replace a water pump, build a camp, put a guy on the moon. He, like most dads, wanted the best for/from us, and instilled/inflicted his perfectionism in me. You didn't want to show anything to Dad unless/until it was perfect.

To Mom, on the other hand, *everything* we did, said, made, or bought was, by her definition, perfect. Everything she saw was, in her words, "the [adjective]-est [noun] you ever laid eyes on". Whatever we had to show or tell her about was the best one ever. New car, girlfriend, pocket knife, shirt, pair of shoes -- whatever it was, no matter how objectively good, bad, or ugly it was, it was the best one she'd ever seen.

You'd think that her seemingly non-critical assessments would make it easy to slack off, but it had the opposite effect on me. I wanted to make everything I made or did live up to her (even though guaranteed) high praise. And she loved to hear my stories, almost as much as I loved telling them to her.

Indeed, it seems like half the things I've done were just to be able to tell the story afterwards -- to my wife, friends, co-workers, but mostly my mom. She was always the best audience, and frequently made telling the story more fun than doing the thing.

And she was entirely the reason I started this blog. I didn't think anyone else would care, and the people close-by would hear the stories first hand. But my mom was far away, and in order to make sure she heard the stories, I started writing them down, if only to have reminders so I could tell them when I get to see her next. What I write, I write for her. As I'm typing, I'm talking to her. If anyone else reads them, that's just gravy.

She was, in her words, "not technical". When I started the blog, I made sure that the entries were automatically sent by email to my dad, who would print them out and let my mom read them on paper. When my dad died, I worked out a way to print them remotely on his printer, so she could hear the print noises and go in the office to find the latest post. (Each post (this one makes 759) is worked out three times -- the original, seldom visited but nicely formatted, searchable, and cataloged by date on http://y7alanzo.blogspot.com/; the text pasted into a Facebook "Note", poorly formatted and ugly, but more accessible to my friends; and a paper-sized, bigger pictures version in Word, printable for my mom, who kept them in a huge 3-ring binder.)

When her health started failing, I started wondering if I would keep the blog going once she wasn't around to read the stories. Now that that's happened, I'm thinking that probably I will. So far, it just seems like it's been a while since I've driven up to see her. But it feels like my best option to keep her around is to keep telling her these stories.

But I'm going to have to stop telling this one before the saltwater shorts out the keyboard. Thanks, Mom -- everybody says that theirs was the best mom ever, but you really were.