Writer Flasbacks

 

 My daughter handed me a brown envelope that her father, my ex, had found in his attic. It contained columns my mother had written.

My mother became a journalist by accident. She had had a business where she sold clothes on a party plan. She only needed to work six months a year and allowed her to be home for my brother and me most of the time.

She answered an ad to become a journalist covering the town of Reading and got the job. Driving back after getting the interview, she decided she couldn't do it and would call the next day to tell them.

Early the morning, before she had her first cup of tea, the calls from friends began to congratulate her. She decided to try the job. How hard could it be after all?

She was great. At one point she was also writing for a Boston daily.

After she retired she wrote two columns: Flashback and Stove Stories for a paper. The later I put into a blog after her death.    https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/2495337841364272054. Over the years I've used many of the recipes, bringing flood of memories with each bite.

Flashback was a nostalgia column of life in the 20s, 30s, and 40s.

As I read them, I learned things about her and my family before I was born that I never knew. I also realized that the way she was treating memory of her childhood and early adulthood, I was doing the same only for the 50s-90s. 

I always admired her writing.

On Phone Networks

"Never will I forget the night I stuttered into the phone trying to get a doctor for my stricken father. Not one, but three local physicians converged in the driveway having been alerted by the operator.

"It wasn't only in emergencies that the local exchange assisted,  I remember when at an early age, asking the local operator how to scramble eggs. She told me."

I suspect she would have a love/hate relationship with the internet and mobile phones.

On Cats She Loved

"I contend that cats vary in intelligence and offer my daughter's 'Toughie' as an example. So brain-lacking was this cat he licked one paw to wash his face but used the other. Call him but his brother 'Splotchie' was smart and a born hunter. who brought bird after bird to my distress. Poor 'Toughie' came home from the hunt, tail held high, to display a single feather."

Despite our differences, writing was something we could agree on. And maybe, just maybe, if there's a love of writing gene in DNA, she passed hers onto me.