My son, Jim will be turning 43 on August 12th.....I find myself reflecting back over the years as my two kids approach their birthdays each year. This is about a special friend who came to the Shook house in August 1974;
Around the time of my son's 3rd birthday (August 12, 1974), my former husband was working out of town with the railroad. He kept calling me telling me about this cute puppy in the window of a pet shop and he thought that Jimmy should have him. I have to admit I wasn't real excited about having a puppy...we already had two cats and I felt that was enough. Well, the dad won out and when he came home at the end of the week he brought this sweet little beagle/terrier mix puppy. We named him Frisky~because he was. Frisky and Jimmy were inseparable for the 11 years that we had Frisky. The last couple years of his life he developed congestive heart failure and finally we had to let him go. He was a great pal to my son....we will always remember the fun times we had with him.
Tuesday May 6, 2014 was the 9th anniversary of my Blog. When I first started writing it was in the days of AOL Journals. That went by the wayside and most of us switched to Blogger. Since most of us have moved to Facebook, I'm not very faithful about posting in my Blog. But I also won't give it up entirely because life changes and who knows...maybe one day I'll be faithful to my Blog again.
Now as we near Mother's Day weekend....I'm posting about the two grand mother's that I was blessed with.
My two grandma's were completely different. My mom's mother was a farmer's wife living in eastern Washington. She always wore an apron and I can remember the smell of baking at their house....cookies, breads, pies, etc. My mom & I would ride the train from Tacoma to Sunnyside and after a few days mom would come back home but I would stay on with my grandparents for another couple weeks. Grandma would bring me back home on the train & I remember the conductor coming down the aisle of the train with a basket of Cracker Jack's and grandma would open her purse, find a nickle and hand it to me so I could buy one. My dad's mother lived here in Tacoma. From a young woman she worked...she was a telegraph operator for the Milwaukee RR. She worked the night shift and often during the summer she would take me to work with her. It was exciting to be in this little shack between two sets of train tracks in the middle of the night with grandma. She would have packed a lunch for us & I can remember the two thermos bottles she'd have. One with coffee and one with milk. Several times each night she would get her lantern and we would walk down the tracks to turn a switch. She smoked cigarettes and mostly wore slacks..unlike my other grandma. And she wasn't much of a baker...she always had store bought cookies, usually Fig Newtons and she loved 7-Up. I can remember being at her house and for lunch she'd make sandwiches and we'd drink 7-up out of the bottle with a green straw. And she made the best peanut butter fudge in the world. I've never been able to find any that compared with hers. There was a bedroom upstairs at her house where I slept when I spent the night with her. She let me play with her doll, Mary. The one she was given as a little girl. It was made in Germany in the late 1890's, has a kidskin body, porcelain face and hands and is stuffed with sawdust. When I look at that beautiful doll, I can't imagine how she could ever let a young girl play with it. But Mary survived and I still have her. I'm blessed to have such wonderful memories of my two, very different grandmothers and I miss them. And absolutely I miss my dear mom as Mother's Day approaches.
Happy Mother's Day to all the moms, step moms, foster moms and dads who had to be both dad and mom.
