Tempus Fugit: I Wish You’d Known My Mom (A Tribute)

Late Morning/Midday, Saturday, October 21, 2023, Lithia, Florida

Hi, there, folks.

If you’re a regular visitor to this space, you might recall that my late mother would have been 95 years old on Tuesday, October 17. As it is, she’s been gone for over eight years; she died less than three months before her 87^th birthday, felled by the effects of dementia and several other health conditions.

I wish that you all had met my mom back in the 1970s and ‘80s when she was still an energetic and highly independent woman. You would have found her to be:

• Witty
• Charming
• Generous
• Well-traveled and cosmopolitan
• Curious and engaged – she subscribed to the Miami Herald and watched news broadcasts two times a day (the 5-7 PM local/national news programs, as well as the 11 o’clock news) till dementia robbed her of her desire to be informed
• Caring
• A voracious reader – Mom liked to pick three or four books at one time, either from her bookshelves or the Miami-Dade Public Library (our branch was the West Dade Regional), and take turns reading from each. Sort of like my TBR stack methodology, but she – at least until 2010 – could finish books faster than I do now
• A fan of documentary films, especially ones about a topic we were both passionate about – history, especially 20^th Century history and World War II. She enjoyed The Civil War, Prohibition, and The War, which were the only Ken Burns docs I had in my DVD/Blu-ray collection at the time of her death. She also enjoyed the 1970s British series The World at War, which we’d watched together when it aired on Miami’s WPBT Channel 2 sometime after 1975
• A great cook
• A fair and responsible parent
• A loyal and trusting friend