Happy Birthday Mom!

Today my mother turns 65. When we went to Baltimore for her birthday party, I considered writing a poem and making a speech, but how do you capture in words all the love that a mother gives you over the years?

There’s the routine of every day life, making sure that you have a nutritious meal to eat, clean clothes, a roof over your head. There’s the life skills, how to read a map, say please and thank you, only curse at the Orioles in the privacy of your own home…or was it to not curse at them…something…anyway… be financially responsible, treat others kindly, do your homework, brush your teeth, take your vitamins, don’t lose your house key (I was really bad at that one, even when I had the humiliation of having to wear it around my neck on a chain). Cultural and educational experiences, Orioles games, plays, Indian and Irish festivals, soccer games (remember the Blast!), hockey (and the Skippers), Colts (let’s not go there), Bolton Hill dinner theatre, the Walters and Smithsonian…There’s the love and warmth of someone who loves you more than anyone else ever will. And finally, there’s the really, really important stuff like making sure you never ran out of Utz and Dunkin Donuts, making sure every summer you attended at least one all-you-can-eat crabfeast (those were the days!!), got crabs to go a few times from Bo Brooks, tediously picked your crabs for you before you learned how to do it, taught you about removing the lungs but eating the mustard, and pulled over countless times for the spontaneous visit to the snowball stand for an Egg Custard or Spearmint snowball with marshmellow or without, depending on your mood (these are the things I miss so much about home).

How can you possibly enumerate all the gifts that a mother and father bestow on you throughout your life? One is left only with an inadequate word of “love” which fails to capture in any meaningful way the feeling in your heart about someone you love and treasure dearly, and cannot imagine not having in your life.

Happy Birthday, Mom! You may dress like a witch or a devil today, but you’re really an angel inside.

Maybe a little devilish, but definitely angelic too. I love you!!!

This entry was posted on October 31, 2007 at 1:53 pm and is filed under That's Love, Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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