My parents

Here is picture of my parents taken at The Restaurant Association Convention the year my dad was President.

My father was of German decent. A very big man, equally gentle with a little girls skinned knee and frighteningly hot tempered when he was provoked. My mother was elegant, beautiful, talented beyond belief and very very "Judy Garland" dark and tragic. Jeez...what a pair...
But, for all of their oddities I can honestly say I always knew I was loved very very much by both of them.

These poor two people should have never married each other. Each so good and loving in their own way and yet so toxic together. I could bore you with all the details but lets make it quick and say daddy liked to drink and momma collected tranquilizer prescriptions for a hobby.

But I have to cut them some slack. It was a time when people didn't divorce easily. They took their vows seriously so for them the only way out was by "death doing them part" ...and they worked very hard at that loophole. Daddy worked and drank himself through each day and mother took her pills and pretended like it was all okay. Sometimes when I would hear Carly Simon's song "The Way I Always Heard It Should Be". (or some title like that) I would freak out thinking she knew my family. They were so 1960ish!

I laugh now as I recall the home I grew up in. Aside from the house being haunted (another story for another time) my parents were crazy. My oldest sister was off to college and the next sister was married for a time and raising a son. And I was me..struggling to find my place and fiercely determined to survive.

There are eight and ten years difference between myself and my two sisters. To say that the house I grew up in was very different from the house they grew up in is probably true. Looking back I think my mother, who wasn't planning a third child, might have had post-partum depression. Back then the doctors didn't understand about chemical imbalances or the value of exercise and nutrition. All they knew about was paper prescriptions that caused their patients to quit complaining and guaranteed to return frequently enough to help them put a kid or two through college. I have often thought about how much better their lives, and ours, would have been if medicine had been twenty five years ahead of its time.

Does this sound like I'm complaining or worse, feeling sorry for myself. NO WAY! Yes, things could have been better, but I survived and grew and learned to be strong and see things for what they are and not let that dictate what I could have in life. And there were many good times...every now and then....no seriously, there were. Wonderful grandparents and aunts and uncles, cousins I love more than they will ever know and my network of friends who kept me sane.

I learned to discern at a very early age that there is a big difference between what people say and what they mean. What they want to do and what they are able to do. What they dream of and what they settle for. Consequently I learned that you can usually find something to love in everyone, even someone who seems unlovable. I learned to balance the injustices they commit against the injustices they endure. I learned that even mistakes, huge mistakes, can be accommodated if there is love, huge love.

My mother died when I was nineteen years old and my father passed away when I was in my late thirties. Both times I alternately cried and breathed a sigh of relief.