Born in Chicago in 1941

 

On December 7^th, 1941, something really big happened.
But also, something very small happened.
A baby.
That baby, born on A Day That Will Live In Infamy, grew up to be my Mom. Joanne.

“I was born in Chicago, in 1941,” -Paul Butterfield Blues Band ©1965

Mom was born the middle child, sandwiched between the brainy older brother and the cute younger sister, and growing up she always felt like the odd one out, with her skinny legs and big eyes. The other kids teased her, calling her “poached egg eyes”. Grandma , a no-nonsense, practical little Serb, never thought to tell her she was pretty. She is, though. She is beautiful with her big eyes and bashful smile. The wavy hair she tried to tame for too long. And though she’s 81 now, she’s forever “J.D. Sexpot” like the concrete guys dedicated her by writing that name in our new sidewalk in 1979.

Anything good at all about me is directly attributable to my mother, who raised us to have a sense of humor about ourselves and never get too chuffed up over  anything. As adults, my brother and I are both recognized as likeable and kind, and I know this stems from how we were raised. 

“Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back, Ellen.”

My Mom has a very professional phone manner I have always admired and emulated. She worked from a young age, and entertained us with stories of working at the Box Seat, a burger and hot dog joint near Wrigley Field. Using her Gregory Shorthand training, she later worked in offices, like Lehman Brothers, and throughout my childhood and into my adult years she was an executive secretary at various companies, Lash Warner and Associates, MPL, Duro Metal, Chicago Botanic Garden, Guarantee Trust Life, Applied Strategies International. I always aspired to the way she carries herself, her style, her confidence, her professional savvy. I taught myself to type on her high school typewriter and to this day I pound on my keyboards unnecessarily hard, as if I were still pounding on that 1950s machine. 

She’s a poet and a writer and puts her thoughts to paper, and she’s always had a knack for amazing photography as well.
She's published a couple of books of her creative writing, She’s always encouraged me, from a very young age to be creative and share my poetic thoughts too.

“We grew up together,” Mom has always said. When my father died in a car wreck, I was five, my brother three, and my mom 35. We were inseparable. Grandma and Grandpa helped, but from a young age we went with mom everywhere, doing things many of my friends didn’t, like dining at restaurants and touring Chicago and the Midwest like grown-ups. Mom didn’t talk down to us. We were expected to rise to her level. She didn’t baby us. She expected a lot from us. We were typical Generation X latch-key kids, but we had the training to survive it.

My Mom has big emotions and big opinions. She doesn’t hold back. Everything is either The Absolute Best! or A Total Living Hell! There is no In-between. We tease her about this. You can tease her about herself, and she laughs big. 

My brother is the best at teasing her. The Absolute Best.

Mom has been through a lot in her life. 

She's been widowed twice.

She's survived cancer and heart scares.

She tripped over a dog gate one evening and knocked out all of her front teeth, which were returned to her mouth in an epic late night oral surgery.

She's been a roller skater, a bowler, a church choir singer. 

Mom’s retired now, in fact only fairly recently since Covid. Up until then she was still taking the train downtown. Though retired, she’s always still working on something: dog walks, bike rides, remodeling her house, walking, writing, teaching English to Ukrainian refugees. I never know what she’ll be up to next.

She has always been like this-- suprising in what she will do.

After being a widow for nearly 30 years, she got married to the great love of her life and sold her house in Chicago and moved to the suburbs.

She got a full back panel tattoo at age 65.

She adopted a dog at age 79 after not owning her own dog for almost 30 years.

You never know what to expect. Once we were driving through a parking lot, near the old "Spindle" in Berwyn, and there were tons of pigeons standing stupidly in the middle of our direction. "Run them over!", we joked, and she did! I don't think she killed any of them, but we felt them bouncing off the bumper and scattering everywhere. "Mom! We were joking!" Hahaha.

She didn’t overreact to anything weird we did during the boundary-pushing antics of our teenage years. In fact, when I was an onery 19-year-old she once suggested I needed to “go get laid”. 
“MO-OMM!”

I think that may have been one of her best attributes as a parent. She didn’t overreact. The worst was she would discuss everything with everyone. If I was trying to find a car, specifically, a vintage Volkswagen, she’d have to ask “everybody and their brother” (mom quote) their advice on the matter. She’d involve EVERYBODY. And everybody got to weigh in with their opinion.

My brother and I are discussing this one time and his wife, Carla, who was mostly self-raised, piped in, "I'd have loved to have someone looking out for me like that."

My mom calls me "Chick-ee-tee-ta" (from the Abba song, or perhaps for being her baby chick), or Gaffer. "The Gaffer" was what she and Dad called me when I was in utero.This was back when baby bedrooms were green or yellow and "gender reveals" were in the distant future. She leaves me funny phone messages, repeating long-time family in-jokes.

"Mrs. Stingle! Your beans are getting cold/ your beans are burning!"

"I just wanted to make sure you weren't murdered, mutilated or in a can of dog food by now. Crite yeah."

"Happy ____(x #) of days before your birthday!"

"WMAQ's gonna make me rich!"

"I love it, and I married it!"

I like to go on trips with my mom. Wisconsin. Washington DC. Mackinac Island. We’re overdue for another adventure. Mom is fun and easy to travel with and we’ve made some great memories on the road together. She won’t fly. She doesn’t fly. Not anymore, not for nearly 30 years. So the distance between us is sometimes hard, me in Arizona and her in Illinois. We talk every day but sometimes I miss her so much, I almost fall to my knees. 

Once while out jogging, Neil Diamond’s “I Am, I Said” came on in my headphones and my eyes flooded with tears nearly instantly. I had to stop running and wipe them away and call her that very moment. Neil Diamond is the soundtrack of my childhood. I still call her when I get stung by a hornet, or am sad about something and she can immediately tell something is wrong, even if all I've said is "hello" or no words at all.

Every day I am keenly aware of how lucky I am to have my Mom in my life. To be able to pick up the phone and call her, and interupt her crossword puzzles and decaf coffee and hear about her day and her dog in her quiet St Charles neighborhood.