Legacy from my mom

Today is Mothers' Day.

My mother died several years ago. She was getting dementia and had a stroke, which made the dementia worse, as well as paralyzing one side of her body. She spent the last few years in a nursing home because she required professional care. Don't want to go too much into that...

Funny, I have this very acute memory. Friends of mine rely on me to recall events from their own lives and I usually can. Like, I remember being in a crib, with my sister, a year older than me, poking her fingers through the bars to torment me. That relationship never changed....

Anyway, I remember one day -- musta been summer -- being out in the back yard with Mom. She had been doing laundry in the basement with one of those wringer washers, then hanging it out on clotheslines in the back yard to dry. It always smelled so good after it dried. And this just a couple miles outside of a major American metropolis and decades before EPA protection.

So we had this enormous oak tree in the backyard. That house has been torn down for 40 years at least and an apartment building stands there now. There's still a big dip in the parking lot -- site of that old oak tree.

I was walking around the oak tree. Around and around the oak tree -- don't know why -- as Mom was pinning wet sheets and stuff on the clothesline.

OK.  Then there's Dad, who was a rabid Roosevelt democrat. He used to get in heated arguments all the time with one of my uncles, who apparently was a rabid Republican. We lived in a mostly-Republican suburb of Chicago, and my dad used to run for local office as a democrat, just so the Republican would have some opposition. Dad died when I was 11 years old, and my teacher at school at the time told me she'd been proud to have a member of my family in her class. I was unaware at the time that anyone knew my dad outside of the immediate family.  But I digress.

My dad was very into politics, an avid TV news watcher, avid newspaper reader. Another one of my uncles, who I believe was, like Dad, rather more sympathetic to the dems than the Reps, had this real disgust for people who didn't keep aware of politics, even though he'd been a bootlegger during Prohibition and did time for it. So above my head was an ogoing political discussion all the time.

So I was about five years old, out in the yard with Mom, her hanging laundry, me walking around and around the oak tree. And I asked her, "Mom, what's the government?"

Ike was in office then. No idea what any of that had to do with any of us.

She said, "The people. The people are the government."

That didn't seem to make any sense and she wouldn't explain. I clearly recall my frustration. Set me on a rather tortured and twisted path.

Save the republc.