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It is a Jewish custom, when someone dies, to say, “May his/her memory be for a blessing.”
We were lucky to have my mother with us until she was 101. In honor of her 105th birthday, I am sharing one of my favorite Mom stories. For a Jewish woman from the Bronx, raising her children in the South, she could become surprisingly inventive in a crisis.
Here’s what happened during a grocery shopping trip with my mother:
As I came out of the supermarket, a car came screeching to a stop and grazed me, sending the groceries from my sack sprawling down the boulevard. My mother, still inside the supermarket, heard the noise and came running with my baby brother in tow.
Maternal instinct, she would tell me later, told her the tires she heard were screeching for me.
I had taken the first grocery bag and left mom in the market, still shopping, while I started the 10-block walk home to study for my junior high final exam the next day.
Lying in the street, I remember seeing the milk carton on its side and thinking the milk would go bad in the sun. I watched an orange roll under a passing car.
In the back of a police car en route to the hospital, Mom put one arm around me and held my 3-year-old brother with the other.
I was crying more from being scared than actually being in pain. But I was shocked out of my tears when my ladylike mother belted out, “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog…”
To say my mother was not an Elvis fan would be an understatement, but she knew her daughter well enough to know what would soothe her.
“What’s the next verse?” Mom asked. Minutes later, her bruised preteen daughter is singing, “Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit and you ain’t no friend of mine!”
The nice policeman driving the car was laughing. My baby brotherwas asking for the candy bar that Mom left in the shopping cart when she raced out of the market. And I was joining my mother in a duet about a hound dog.
“Let’s see what we can do to make you feel better young lady,” the ER doctor smiled at me.
“She likes Elvis music,” my mother offered.
I recovered from my hip contusions (and even learned what a contusion is) and was Queen of the May for the next few days. Mom, newly minted rock star, pampered me with Elvis music on my 45 RPM record player and my favorite meals in bed. And, I’m pretty sure I heard her singing in the kitchen while she cooked, “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog…”
Your memory continues to be a blessing, Mom.
Email patriciabunin@sbcglobal.net and follow her on Twitter @patriciabunin
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