The good stuff

I started this tumblr when Tumblr was new, and didn't do much with it. After the deaths of both my parents in pretty rapid succession, I want to use this site to share a little bit about them and about my childhood. My brothers and sisters may show up as well.

My avatar photo was provided on Flickr by Norm Walsh. I chose it because my mom and I had an ongoing argument for YEARS about whether dandelions are a flower or a weed.
Sat Apr 9
My mom carried her keys on this giant key ring for the entire time I knew her. It’s a pewter replica of an Eisenhower dollar; it’s smooth and heavy and cool, but not cold. In the picture, you can see where my mother’s fingers and thumb rubbed some of the surface off of Eisenhower’s head.  That part of the coin is warmer, somehow, and rougher to the touch.  (That’s a U.S. dime next to it for scale.)   The story I heard was that my mom once lost her keys in the produce section of the grocery store. She never did find them, but she carried the replacements on this thing and (to my knowledge) never lost them again. There was a characteristic sound to my mom’s keys - and it was the ring, it wasn’t the 30+ keys attached to it.  You could hear the keys through the door, and all of us kids appreciated a few seconds’ advance warning before my mom came in the house. As an adult, I remember waiting and waiting for my parents to arrive at a cousin’s wedding reception; they’d gotten lost and were over an hour late, but I knew the second my mom walked into the room.  The sound of the keys tipped me off. It’s just a thing.  My mom kept a whole lot of things, to the extent that a lot of them aren’t that meaningful to me.  But this one thing was with her pretty much all the time, and it’s one of a very few objects about which there may be some sibling strife in terms of who ends up with it.  It has more of my mom in it than almost anything else.

My mom carried her keys on this giant key ring for the entire time I knew her. It’s a pewter replica of an Eisenhower dollar; it’s smooth and heavy and cool, but not cold. In the picture, you can see where my mother’s fingers and thumb rubbed some of the surface off of Eisenhower’s head.  That part of the coin is warmer, somehow, and rougher to the touch.  (That’s a U.S. dime next to it for scale.)  

The story I heard was that my mom once lost her keys in the produce section of the grocery store. She never did find them, but she carried the replacements on this thing and (to my knowledge) never lost them again.

There was a characteristic sound to my mom’s keys - and it was the ring, it wasn’t the 30+ keys attached to it.  You could hear the keys through the door, and all of us kids appreciated a few seconds’ advance warning before my mom came in the house. As an adult, I remember waiting and waiting for my parents to arrive at a cousin’s wedding reception; they’d gotten lost and were over an hour late, but I knew the second my mom walked into the room.  The sound of the keys tipped me off.

It’s just a thing.  My mom kept a whole lot of things, to the extent that a lot of them aren’t that meaningful to me.  But this one thing was with her pretty much all the time, and it’s one of a very few objects about which there may be some sibling strife in terms of who ends up with it.  It has more of my mom in it than almost anything else.