Dance the Watusi

My mom had all these interesting little phrases she used such as, "She looked like she wanted to dance the Watusi!" It took me a few years to figure some of them out. Another one was, "Well, just give me a New York minute!" One of my personal faves was, "I about had kittens!" I remember her taking me to the doctor when I was young and informing him that, "She 'flipped her cookies' twice last night." When you're a little girl and don't have much background schema for such phrases and meanings, it does tend to help you visualize some pretty interesting scenarios! She loved to chat with people and I spent a lot of time listening to her. I learned to tell stories from her.

Mom never completed the ninth grade. However, she loved to read and believed in sending us to school. The woman never once took me to a public library, but she always let me order books from Scholastic and I think of her every month when I send the same Scholastic book order forms home with my fifth graders. Mom and Dad purchased a set of World Book Encyclopedias for us when we were young. Mom read them the most! She would choose a volume, such as "P" and take it to bed every night for weeks, learning all sorts of random things. She subscribed to the Reader's Digest and so of course, I bought the December issue in the Denver airport the other day. I remember her laughing in the old Suburban while reading excerpts aloud to the rest of us. One of my roommates mentioned once that my habit of reading the newspaper every morning seemed like such a male thing to do. This surprised me because my mom loved to read the newspaper every day--I never thought of it as a gender specific activity.

She was blind in one eye and her good eye had an infection this last while. She was so happy when it started to clear up enough that she could resume reading the paper and working her Sudoku puzzles. She loved to play Yahtzee by herself. All of my sisters and I have memories of that Yahtzee cup shaking and shaking with the dice spilling onto the dining room table late into the evening. It was her way of winding down after a long day at work. And then they invented the hand-held electronic Yahtzee. Mom kept notebook after notebook with lists of all her scores. She would talk about "beating him" or "beating the man." As a young girl, I couldn't quite figure out who that man was when she played Solitaire and other card games. I think I'll play a game of Yahtzee now!