Mom
My mother was the life of the party. Here’s a casual joke she liked. When a friend of hers was asked how many people his cabin cruiser slept, he repllied: “Sleeps four. Fucks eight.”
Mom taught folk guitar starting in the late ’50s, back when Alan Lomax and The Weavers were big and before anything was blowing in the wind. When folk music went mainstream and everyone was learning how to Carter pick, our house became the locus of hootenannies: teenagers singing “The Cat Came Back,” accompanying themselves on guitars and banjos.
Mom was hooked into the Left politics of the War years and late ’40s, and got a job at the center of the action, The New Republic. She would have worked her way up and threaded her way through that crowd, except she was randomly chosen as my father’s war-time penpal, and they got married a couple of weeks after meeting in person. Never underestimate the power of hot sex. She eventually realized that she didn’t like my father very much.
She was pretty much a conspiratorial pan-theologist, believing whatever the Establishiment didn’t want us to believe, including that we are responsible for our own luck and health. She died about ten years ago of lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking Luckies.
