Inch Time Foot Gem: For My Mother This Mother's Day is Around Day #37,380..... @ AMERICAN DIGEST

May 14, 2017

Inch Time Foot Gem: For My Mother This Mother's Day is Around Day #37,380.....

Strong and yet as delicate as a bird. Her first memory is of being held on the shoulders of her father and watching American troops parade down Main Street in Fargo, North Dakota, on their return from the First World War sometime in what must have been the late Spring (Maybe May) of 1919.

She's been a student of Moorhead State Teachers College and is now their oldest alumni. A class reunion is anywhere she is and at anytime she decides to have it. She still reads the alumni magazine.

In fact she still reads The Saturday Evening Post, having been a subscriber since 1943. "It's a very interesting magazine. Not as important as it once was, but still with a good variety to its articles."

She's taught school in everything from a one room, multi-grade school in Lake of the Woods, Minnesota to the modern modular buildings of Chico Country Day. At that school she put in 6,000 hours of reading classics such as Black Beauty and Treasure Island to generations of children.

She married her husband and lived with him for over 30 years until he died in 1972. Since then there has never been another man in her life.

She raised three sons of her own. All of whom had pretty good lives and none of whom came to any more bad passages than life ordinarily deals everyone.

I am one of them.

Last November she celebrated her 102nd birthday and again I discovered at her party that she has more friends just in the town of Chico, California than I know people in the entire world.

Thirty-seven thousand and three hundred and eighty days.

"Not twice this day
Inch time foot gem.

This day will not come again.
Every minute is worth a priceless gem."

-- Takuan

Posted by gerardvanderleun at May 14, 2017 12:06 AM

Comments:

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What the other folks said, Gerard. I can't add anything.

But I guess I will, anyway. God bless her, and consider yourself a lucky man.

Hale Adams
Pikesville, People's still-mostly-Democratic Republic of Maryland

Posted by: Hale Adams at May 10, 2015 6:13 PM

Happy Mother's Day to your dear mother. Even for all that she is, above and alone from the fact of her motherhood, you and your brothers are still her proudest accomplishment, her greatest blessing, her deepest joy. Never doubt it.

Posted by: Joan of Argghh! at May 10, 2015 6:23 PM

Happy Mother's Day, Mrs. Vanderleun.

And I've said it before, Gerard, and I'll say it again -- you're a lucky man.

Posted by: Hale Adams at May 14, 2017 6:04 PM