The Mother’s Day We’ll Never Forget

I think you know the gruff old guy on the right. He might talk tough but he’s really a big baby. You may also know his brothers: Nick, the senior retired American intelligence official, and Peter, the Chicago businessman, on the left. The elderly woman in the center is so happy, surrounded by her sons at a family gathering prior to her 95^th birthday last year.

But I see them as they were, once, some sixty years ago on a thick, rough, red hand-woven Greek village blanket on the edge of lagoon in Chicago’s Sherman Park on the edge of the Union Stockyards. I think of a sunny, cool autumn afternoon and that mother and her children in the sun.

The woman wore long shoulder-length auburn hair and dark hose,  brown leather walking shoes, a green tartan plaid skirt and a brown turtleneck sweater.

They had small boxes of animal crackers for snacks and there were books on the blanket, books about knights and Childe Harold and The Goblin King.

She was a Canadian by birth. Her father had fought in both WWI and WWII.

As a young girl from Guelph, Ontario she’d listened to the German bombing of London on the radio, and so she was a daughter of the British empire, and taught us, her boys, to sing “There Will Always Be an England” and “God Save The Queen.”