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Our elderly parents. (From about 2010.)
With deep affection and limitless respect and gratitude.)



Classmates, does (or did) your elderly mom or dad ..


1. Invariably greet you by asking, “Have you had your breakfast/lunch/dinner?”

2. Enjoy anecdotes about when you and your siblings were babies or infants?

3. State occasionally, “You were a good little boy (or girl)”, almost as if to imply you subsequently embarked on a life of crime?

4. State emphatically that vegetable and fruit (especially citrus fruit) were “so much better” when he or she was a kid?

5. Add a moment later that, “Everything was!”

6. Extol the extraordinary virtue of homemade ice cream?

7. Does your mom often remark on how someone she knew in high school or college was “a real good dancer”?

8. Habitually allow gruesome television programs about giant river killers or close-up profiles of notorious violent felons or a compelling medical documentary about bowel surgery to play on and on when he or she become engrossed in a magazine, letter or other item of interest?

9. Justifiably pick at the signally poor, watered down food served by her elderly care center?

10. Rise at the break of dawn or before?

11. Look forward to certain “sweet girls” and “cheerful kids” visiting her from the staff?

12. Forcibly offer you detailed instructions on simple cooking or household tasks, how to balance a checkbook or handle financial transactions, or evaluate and choose your friends?

13. Inquire with fond concern, “You don’t still wear those shoes anywhere, do you?”

14. Ask you endearing questions like what the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were, or if a relative or celebrity is still alive, or “whatever happened to” David Niven or Mary Tyler Moore, let’s say?

15. Get your age wrong by up to 40 years in a question such as, “Do you remember when you were a little guy and Perino’s closed?”

Classmates, that’s enough for now. I wouldn’t trade my dear little mom for the entire North American land mass. May God bless all our parents and elderly friends, whether with us still or departed.

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Lad Perenyi on February 16, 2023 at 8:07 PM said:

doing a lot of this, Mom is 90

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