Hey, Rap:

I know so many people who lost their Father or Mother early in their life and would give anything just to be able and sit at the kitchen table with them. I've been sharing my writings with two old friends, as well as with my family. One was a very close friend who went out to Oregon to college and settled there. I saw him once in his first year of college when he came back for his Father's funeral, but only for a handshake and a word of comfort at the funeral parlor. Ten years or so ago, he and his wife came out East for their daughter's graduation and stopped by to visit for a day. That's the only time I've been able to sit around the kitchen table and talk with him. He is not a correspondent, and never has been, so we've been relegated to exchanging Christmas cards with a two sentence letter. I've been e-mailing all that I've been writing, and after all these years, our friendship has rekindled in a marvelous way. The reason that I thought about him, reading your last post is that we both came to know the other's mother when we were well into adulthood. When I was living in Connecticut, he went back to our home town for another funeral and stopped up and visited with my parents. I have a photograph of him sitting on our front porch with a half-gray beard. My Mother talks warmly about him coming to visit, and under other circumstances I had a chance to get to know his Mother a little when she was in the Health Care Center where my Mother lives. She could barely get in and out of bed and was near the end of her days, but her mind was sharp. She had a wonderful sense of humor and a curiosity that I never noticed when I was a kid. We had a couple of long conversations and they weren't "remember when" talks. I didn't really remember much about her except that she was of Germanic stock, always had her hair in a tight bun and appeared mysteriously with something for us to eat or drink. As I wrote recently, when you're a kid, adults sometimes are not much more than vending machines. You don't have to insert a coin: just a polite word usually works. More often than not, unlike a vending machine, you find that you get want you want without even asking. Both my friend Earl Who Got Herbert and I are thankful that we got to know each other's mothers as adults. To us, they are people first, and mothers of a friend second.

My Father lived to be a month or so short of 94 yet in some ways, I didn't know him well. He was very bitter about his childhood and took offense at so many innocent actions in his life that he shut people out. But, in later years we became friends as well as father and son and I am thankful for that. We managed to set aside old battles and accept that there were things in each other that we couldn't understand, and just loved what we could in each other. There was more than enough of that.

Jerry