After that I was told that grandpa bought land in Elizabeth and Hillside New Jersey and began building development homes, apartment buildings, hospitals, and Y’s and the like the time span for all this was approximately from 1913(Mom was just two then) to 1957 or 8 when grandpa died of a heart attack that winter while visiting here in Florida, but in Miami.
My Mom was a lovely slender petite auburn haired young girl and so when her high school class was looking for someone to play the role of Anne of Green Gables she got the choice part.
Mom also sang in her school choir and was the eldest of five but was not really interested in being a big sis.
She was to go on to college, but fell in love and married her first husband a musician and two years later gave birth to my half brother who later served in Seoul Korea as a medic in the Air-Force.
Unfortunately, that particular Hubby had a roving eye and so their marriage did not last.
When Mom and my brother left him they were both still rather young she in her twenties and a legal secretary managing on her own as a single parent, and her son not yet ten. But soon Mom was introduced to the man who would eventually become my father who at the time was a very young widower of only thirty-one; his wife had had a heart conditioner and died doing of all things that she loved, swimming, and sadly at the age of just twenty-nine. When Mom was about thirty and my father was thirty-four they both married for their second time in 1941.
Mom helped Dad in his dairy store, which Dad had been in business since the age of nineteen, not unlike convenience stores of today, by 1946 Dad went into business with his three male cousins and they bought a bowling alley and cocktail lounge in Hasbrouck Heights New Jersey.
Mom became a lady of leisure and while they lived in North Bergen at the time, my Mom wanted a daughter and so she had to have some type of woman surgery in order to do that and she did which was not that common in those days since she was already thirty-eight and by the summer of 1950 I was born in Margaret Hague Hospital in Jersey City, NJ and Mom was thirty-nine and Dad by now was forty-three with his first and only child, since his first wife was too ill to have children!
Sadly people thought he was my grandfather since he was bald, but Mom held up well though and was never questioned about her age or no one ever assumed that she was my grandparent.
When I was a year and a half old my parents moved us into our first home in the suburbs, Paramus NJ, the one I grew up in from February 1952 until summer of 1966 it was all I knew and then we moved to Emerson NJ for where I was married from.
Mom was not healthy with arthritis and later on breast cancer and then her sad finale of a massive stroke before her seventy-first birthday!
In spite of her ailments while I grew up I would come home from school to see my Mom dancing in the kitchen to any pleasant ditty on the radio and it was usually a current song.
Yes, Mom also loved music and as you know by now her first husband was a musician and my father although not really musically inclined and practically tone deaf did have live entertainment in the club portion of his cocktail lounge, and at times a screen would come down behind the large circular bar and on it were the words to songs with that timely bouncing ball. Live Dixieland bands were there often but all different kinds of music were there regularly too.
It was a great time had by all and it was pretty much the forefather of sports bars that celebrity athletes would stop in to.
In the forties, fifties and most of the sixties it was what would have been thought of as a happening place!
Mom was the bookkeeper and helped dad that way, and so in 1965 when Dad decided to retire after two of his cousins passed away and he found himself never taking a day off he sold it with his last cousin’s decision, an attorney, to do it too.
Mom and I were happy that now we would see my father more and for six whole months he went crazy, this was a man who worked literally from the age of nine or ten while he was a student too and finished high school and some college.
And so Dad went to the part time job concept after that wonderful summer that I drove them both crazy cross country vacation, he was more than ready to go back to work.
These were my later teen years which I mentioned last night and now I seem to be repeating myself.
My half brother was not well and when he would come out of the VA hospital he would drive both my parents crazy and so that was climate in our home, tension so strong you could cut it with a knife and so Mom was justly upset and I was difficult and boy how she survived her two kids is amazing when I think back now…but she did and took it all in her stride with love and a real concerted effort to understand both of her misguided children.
I don’t think I ever gave her enough credit for what she endured, but unfortunately many of us Mother’s do daily…
Love seems too simple to say to her but I did truly love her looking back though I don’t ever think I said it enough to her…
And so all of you out there who still have those breathing loving souls in your midst, say it as often as you can since you never know when the day might come that they won’t be able to hear you since they won’t be there…
On that friendly warning let me be the first to wish you all a very happy good night tonight and to ask you kindly to count those blessings and share those overages and we will too!
And next time please be here or there or up where or around the bend or whatever you wish to be, ya hear me?
PS A wonderful surprise happened today our eldest surprised me with an early mother’s day present by coming all the way down here without telling me ahead of time!
He took Hubby and I and his lovely gal all out to one of our favorite lunch spots at Fishville!
PSS Congrats to John Velázquez, the jockey who rode the winning thoroughbred, Animal Kingdom for the win in the 137th Kentucky Derby!
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