My family

Family Stories Vlog

HOME ALONE

22 Dec 2016

A good follow-up to yesterday's entry was this video I came across today.  I'd forgotten about it, but it pretty much shows everything I talked about yesterday...and the background music is "the Grassy Noel," the song our kids' band, Lawsuit wrote and recorded.

When he came home this afternoon, Walt was amazed to discover that I had not left the house today.  I had seen my mother yesterday and didn't feel like another hour of saying the same thing over and over again. 

So I "decorated."   This is about as decorated as we are going to get, but it does have a festive look to it, however small.

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After writing about the manger my father built, I dug it out and put it on the shelf of a small cabinet, with the baby Christmas tree on top of it.  On top of the tree is "Gloria," the angel which was supposed to go on the manger, but which doesn't fit now because there isn't enough space under the table.

When Jeri first to read, she read the banner the angel is holding, which says "gloria" and decided that must be the angel's name, so she has been Gloria ever since.

I also went through a lot of photos I found...I thought I found them all months ago, but these were in the living room and are yet more to fit into this office here, some of them from Christmases past.

It was really a mismash of all sorts of photos from all sorts of eras, most with my mother before she got so bad.

You know, it's weird about my mother.  I have called her "Momma" ever since I grew out of calling her "Mommy."  I don't recall us ever discussing what I called her but I've never called her anything else, whether calling her by name, or writing a letter to her or putting a tag on a gift for her.  She's not a letter writer, but she did send or give cards at various gift-giving occasions and she never once signed a card "Momma."  It was "mom" or "mama."  I never ever called her "mom" and I never ever spelled it "mama"  I always thought it weird that for 60 or so years, we both thought of her name as having different spellings, or being different entirely. 

Of course now it doesn't make any difference because part of the time she doesn't remember my name, let alone what I call her.  But I wonder why that was....  Did she not LIKE the name "Momma" ??

In the mid afternoon, Jeri called.  She usually calls from her car when she's on her way to play a gig somewhere.  She has been playing Mame for the last few weeks, but it closes on Friday (and then she and Phil will be able to fly to California.  We talked for about an hour and a half and the nice thing about it was that my ear didn't cut her off once.  My old phone disconnected many times so I finally started using ear phones instead of holding it like a phone.  But with the new one, that apparently isn't a problem.

Anyway, it was a quiet day at home, I learned some more things about my phone, got some decorating done, sorted through two more boxes of photos, and, if we're lucky, sometime before Chritmas, I may actually do some cleaning in the house.