Diamond Jubilee

Somehow it escaped comment here. A little over a week ago, my mother celebrated her seventy-fifth birthday. That didn't mean that I forgot her entirely. I called and sang "Happy Birthday" along with my brood in our own inimitable style, and we sent our gift and card to celebrate the occasion. Yet here on the blogosphere it was strangely quiet. How could this be? The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame had not one but two enormous concerts at Madison Square Garden with accompanying special issue of Rolling Stone to acknowledge twenty-five years of existence. Shouldn't my mother get three times the coverage?
This is, after all, a woman who raised three boys. They grew up to be a sheriff's officer, a teacher, and an artist, and responsible members of their communities. She mothered countless more of their friends and acquaintances over the years: feeding them, pulling their loose teeth, cleaning up their messes and scrapes and bumps, and always giving them the attention that they might have missed somewhere else along the way. When she became a grandmother, it was almost redundant, since she had been so grand to all of us for so long.
This was the woman who celebrated her seventieth birthday in Disneyland. In a torrential downpour. Standing in line with all of us as we cajoled her onto just one more ride. After years of kidding and pranking and joking, she is the woman who has asked, "Don't I deserve a little respect?" And while we all kept giggling and playing along, we knew she didn't mean it rhetorically.
Whenever I got hurt, physically or emotionally, my mother was there to console me. She still is. Back in the olden days, she used to put my head in her lap and stroke my head, letting me know that everything would be all right. It wasn't until I was a little older, and watched her comforting our dachshund after an ill-advised run-in with a pair of German Shepherds, I was able to hear what she was saying: "Assatime, assatime." I recognized those words, not because they made literal sense, but because I knew what they meant. She could make pork chops in orange juice and brown sugar glaze and bake legendary chocolate chip cookies and host parties for our entire neighborhood and run her own bookkeeping business and clean the house and play the piano and read us all stories and buy us comic books and drive that twisty dirt road up to our cabin loaded down with supplies in a Volkswagen squareback, and she could make everything all right.
My mom deserves to have Bruce Springsteen to drop by and serenade her.
Happy Birthday, Mom. Assatime.