Gin Gin and Doll Baby.

This photo was taken on 12/25/1970.  Mothers and daughters experience a lot of things together - buying clothes, taking trips, cooking meals, etc.  In the span of two years, they both experienced being widows.  My mother's first husband died in 4/21/1968 and my grandfather died 12/19/1970.  I don't know what it was like for two people stricken with grief to battle that anguish together, but they did.  

I always thought of these two as my mother and my grandmother.  I talked to these people about things that happened in my present day, at the time, and where I did ask them about things that happened in the past - I didn't experience those things at the same time.  

I had a special conversation with a mentor of mine, Toni Brock, last week and we both talked about how we take for granted what we know about our parents.  We only knew them from the time we entered the world but these had an entire life before we entered it.  My grandmother was the type of person that looked exactly the same at 6pm as she did at 6am - never a hair out of place or a wrinkle in her clothing.  She would empty the ashtray before you could snub out your cigarette and according to one of my older cousins, you could barely get your panties pulled up before she was scrubbing out the toilet.  Looking back on all this, she was definitely what we now call, OCD.  She was a "safe bet" person that kept her investments low risk and all of her affairs in order up to the minute.  After I was born she had colon cancer in 1987 and slowly wasted away until 1995 - she loved to laugh but she wasn't the same person after her illness, as we can surely understand.  She traveled to San Diego, CA, in 1943 on the promise that my grandfather would marry her and worked in a Chinese laundry until she moved back to Arkansas to give birth to my mother after my grandfather was deployed for service in WWII.  My grandparents were only married 27 years but after 1970, she proved herself to be a very independent woman.  She was the statistician for International Paper Co. in Camden, AR, and not even for the times - she made a very comfortable living for herself and also provided for other members of our family in their times of need.  One of my cousins, Gary, who my grandparents helped raise, said to me "Gin Gin could afford to buy a new car every two years on interest alone from her investments."  Even though I thought it was a little crass for him to say that it did give me a sense of pride of how she took care of herself and others.

Now, Doll Baby, my mother, was the exact opposite of her mother.  She was born a free spirit and an only child so she was not just used to ALL the attention, she demanded it.  She was one of those people that did whatever she wanted and knew that she had a dependable mother to fall back on if times got too tough.  If mom had $5, she spent $6.  If she wanted to sit and read books for the entire weekend as every dish in the house pilled up in the sink, that's exactly what she did.  Or if a friend stopped by on her motorcycle and said "you wanna to to San Antonio with me?" - away they went.  I realized when I was in my early 20's and at a pre-going out cocktail party that the peculiar smell I was in was not only my friends smoking pot - it was a smell I'd noticed my entire early childhood after I went to bed.  My mother was a gypsy, a bohemian, most well read, and she could piss me off in less than half an hour while we watched Jeopardy and she could question more than 90% of all the answers.  I loved her for all her qualities and in spite of the others.

If I could ask each of them one thing I think I'd like to know what their goals were when they were my age today because I know how it all turned out.