Pam, the talented author of the Writing, Work and Weasels blog, had a nice idea for Mother’s Day – write some of your favorite mom memories for Mother’s Day.

Here are a couple of mine that I haven’t previously shared.

A trait I inherited from my Mom is the ability to take a common word and suddenly, without warning, treat it like it’s an alien word. For me, back in the late 80’s, I was completely against a movie called Plato On (I still blame the dog tags for that beautiful mix-up). I remember exclaiming loudly in the theater, when I saw the slide come up on the screen, “Who would want to see Plato On?” that’s when Mom responded dryly, “You mean, Platoon?” Ohhh… awkward. (This may be another reason I’m known as the token blonde among some of my friends.) But this is about Mom… So, off Mom goes to McDonald’s. She glances over the menu and spies something wholly new – a ham burger. Oh, this looks good – something new to try! So she moseys up to the cashier and states, “I would like a HAM burger,” and of course, this is what she received. When she opened the wrapper, she looked at it in horror – they’d given her an ordinary “hamburger.” She nearly went up to the register to complain before the synapses started firing, and she looked around embarrassed.

My Mom was also a huge autograph hound back in the day and could typically be found on the tarmac of Dallas’ Love Field airport chasing down people like Judy Garland, Jane Mansfield, Jimmy Stewart, etc as they exited their planes. According to Mom, the news crews began shooting around her, because she was a fixture out there. Anyway, at some point she and a friend convinced a young Shirley Jones that they were forming a Shirley Jones fan club, and they talked their way into her hotel room, “interviewed” her, and took her picture. That picture is in our family album.  It was something she was quite proud of. For the record, they could not talk their way around Jane Mansfield’s people. Mom was fearless when it came to any celebrity until the day she had the opportunity to meet her idol, Jane Goodall. After standing in line and nearly reaching Ms. Goodall, Mom suddenly became too shy and overwhelmed to even be near her. Mom then ducked out of the line and basically hid. My aunt, who was there, gave her a hard time because this was not the big sister she knew.

I’ll end this with another photo from Mom’s album – another of her memories from Love Field when she was 13.

Pam, thank you for sharing your memories about your mom and encouraging us to share our own.