Category Archives: mom

Everything Louder Than Everything Else

mom, music, personal Leave a comment

Jim Steinman: Tributes paid to ‘the Wagner of rock’ (yahoo.com) I will defend Mom to the ends of the earth on pretty much everything of consequence, but that doesn’t mean I necessarily share her taste when it comes to people and media. She had her share of crushes that I could never understand — William Shatner, Franco Harris, Kevin Nash — and although we shared a deep love for several musicians, we definitely had some favourites that were incomprehensible to the other. Mom was a…

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Alone for the Holidays

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Americans plan Thanksgiving gatherings despite health official warnings (NBC via Yahoo! News) One of the smaller details I remember from the day Mom passed away is that I’d actually bought a ticket to a Halloween party that one of my friends was putting on that evening. I’d had misgivings about that party before I’d even bought a ticket, even though I was sure that if Mom had been able to articulate anything at that point, she would have encouraged me to go. I’d basically gone…

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Something for the Occasion

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Today would have been Mom’s seventy-fifth birthday. Part of me wants to use the present-tense “is” in that sentence, since I still feel Mom’s presence in my life every day. (Today is not a good day to get me started on the vicissitudes of verb tense standards in different cultural situations.) In a way, it feels like that choice makes me focus on what might have been in our lives here if things had turned out differently, instead of what there is right now. Maybe,…

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Scrabble-Rouser

mom, personal, videogames Leave a comment

I was worried enough about the pandemic in the days leading up to our campus closing that I could feel my mind going to a very worrying place. For all the challenges I’ve faced after Mom’s passing, I could at least formulate some vague notion of the advice she’d give me if she were here in the flesh, even if they were challenges she never faced herself. A global pandemic that shuts so much of daily life down is something that neither she, nor even…

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Holiday Pain

food, mom, personal Leave a comment

As wonderful as Mom was, she wasn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination. She made chili every few weeks, and I never did like it, to the point where I wound up staying away from vegetarian chili recipes for most of my life. After I got here to Wisconsin, though, I knew that I needed to start making good warm-me-up meals I could take to campus with me for lunch and heat up in the microwave, so I bit the bullet and tried making…

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