A Tribute to Claire

My mom turns 76 today. She is from that cohort that would go to any lengths to lie about her age, and for years I had no idea how old she was. She even made herself a couple years younger on my birth certificate! Nowadays she says she lies in the other direction, telling people she's 85, so they remark about how great she looks for 85.

My mom loves baseball. And her mother before her. My grandmother used to take my mom out of school to watch the St Louis Cardinals play. Then my mom would fill her diary with baseball statistics. She still keeps score at games, and so do I.

Claire keeping score

My mom loves dogs. She talks for dogs and gives them all their own unique voices and accents. We had a standard-sized dachshund when I was little who had a German accent. I think dogs love her because they know she can read their minds. My mom can also speak Horse and Cat.

"Dolly" by CC Fawcett

Her dad, my grandfather, was an artist for Ralston Purina, and painted dogs for a living. She grew up among dog show people, and is one herself. She is authorized to judge Kerry Blue Terriers and a few other breeds. She married my dad, a veterinarian. That was probably the next best thing to marrying a baseball player.

My mom loves me -- she has observed me making choices in my life that I am sure make absolutely no sense to her. She is a seriously conservative Republican lady. My dad says she's "to the right of Ghengis Khan", which is a slight exaggeration. There are topics that my mom and I have no need to or interest in discussing, and we probably cancel each other's votes out in any election (my mom is also a die hard poll worker). One thing that probably worked in our favor was that politically and as a parent, she believed in laissez-faire. I think that I am among the last generation of kids who got to grow up roaming the neighborhoods until the streetlights went on. Actually, to call us in, she would honk the horn of the giant gold Oldsmobile Delta 88 (the "golden oldie"), and you could hear that for miles around.

She worries for me because Buddhism is really not about taking Jesus as a personal Lord and Savior. But I think in her quiet moments she can probably find some confidence about life and the afterlife working out okay for me. She has managed to communicate to me -- subtly and without a lot of sentimentality -- that she'd love me if I belonged to a Satanic cult. She would never say it in those words, but she has communicated it. A small pat on the shoulder when she's walking by communicates volumes in the WASP world. And she had a blast at my big fat Zen wedding (my dad, on the other hand, a slightly different story).

Ah, family.

She does worry a lot, and is a gentle person, afraid of pain, and has never gotten her ears pierced because of this.

She is also generous, and routinely holds up traffic to let other cars merge. She would always drive a small handful of my grade school softball team home from our games and stop at McDonald's for a snack on the way.

Once they got to know her, whether they were grade school or high school or even now, my friends will usually come to a similar conclusion that goes something like, "Your mom is so cool!" Not the cool let-you-get-away-with-anything-kind of cool. My curfew was 11:30pm until I went away to college. But the appreciate-the-beings-visiting-this-house-and-listen-to-them-kind of cool.

She is smart and funny, and loves a play on words, a crossword puzzle, a Tom Swifty, and can still speak damn-near fluent Spanish after only a few years of high school Spanish.

She is thrifty, and was recycling way before it was cool.

She is seriously into gardening, and I would not be surprised if she starts bowhunting deer from her rooftop to keep them from eating her roses. She asked for a chainsaw for her birthday one year -- relatively recently-- so she could clear out some brush in the back yard. She knows the names of most iris, which is her all-time favorite flower. When I took her to the iris gardens here in the Pacific Northwest, and she saw the sprawling acres and acres of blooming iris in ridiculous variety and color, she whispered to me, "It's even better than I thought it would be!"

So Happy Birthday Claire! Not everybody gets to have such an awesome mom. I am very glad you are my mom.