Mother was born October 10, 1910 to a couple of seventeen year old teenagers who had quit school in order to elope.  They were always poor, but they loved my pretty mother.  They quickly nicknamed her "Tootsy," and Tootsy was characteristically a barrel of fun.

    Here is a picture of her at 17, with a lollpop on the beach.  She's the one on the right.

She soon was to fall in love with my father (I have their love letters) and a few years later they had me.

That's my mom and dad, with me in the middle, about 1940.  There was always a joke about this picture because we look like three gangsters.

After I was born, my father soon gave up his band and started trying to make money.  It was during the war, and he managed to obtain a special job that kept him home, protected by the government.  He engraved rubber stamps for printing labels on bags of things sent overseas.  He worked in a shop out in the back of the house.  Even so, my mom and dad continued to party.  The idea was that life could be over anyday and it was good to enjoy what we could of this short life.  (Neverthless, strangely enough, they believed in avoiding much alcohol -- because you can't dance and party as much when you're drunk, so they said.)  I can remember many a night being swept away to still another adult party and being tucked away in some strange bed while the music blared.  And I can also remember many a day when people gathered in our house to talk and laugh and sing, even during the blackouts under a blanket while we listened to the radio about bombers that might be flying overhead (but never really were).

The fun was just part of daily life, as far as I could see.  For example, one day mother told me to bring home friends from school.  When I arrived home I couldn't find her, but I heard a voice from her bedroom, and my friends and I tracked it down.  There, peering out from under the bed, were two little button faced sock creatures talking to us.  She and a friend had made hand puppets and were hiding under the bed to put on a puppet show.  All my friends thought I had the most wonderful mother in the world.  She was always homeroom mother.

Ten years after I was born my parents had one other child, my brother, but things were harder for my folks then.  My father worked longer hours and preferred to sit under the trees and worry about money in his spare time.  Mother sneeked dance lessons behind his back and joined a gymnastics group.  Then, ten years after my brother was born, my father died.  Mother soon married again to another partying man.  The two of them often took my grandmother (who came to live with them) and the three of them traveled around the country in a recreation vehicle, east coast, west coast, north and south.   When that husband died, mother acquired a series of  handsome boyfriends, all in their seventies, and she continued to party.  I remember visiting; my mother while she was in her mid-seventies, my grandmother in her nineties, and the two of them were quarreling (uncharacteristic).  My grandmother said, "Tootsy, you can't come in at one in the morning.  Just imagine what our neighbors must think!" and mother retorted, "Mom, I'm a grown woman.  I can do what I want."  And she always did -- although it seems to me that what she wanted was innocent enough by today's standards.

Between husbands, mother often had to work, but even that was fun.  She worked temporary jobs, never for very much (thank goodness for inheriting money from her husbands).  She never really went back to school but she was always taking (or giving) fun lessons, art lessons ice skating lessons (in her seventies), drama lessons, guitar lessons, and speech lessons, and those are just the lessons that I know about. In speech class she gave a speech about the sex life of inanimate objects, focusing on the way coathangers stick together.  She did all of this on 50 percent hearing, no hearing aids.

And, in California, before she died, she continued to be the lively lady that inspired people with her energy at the senior center.  She caught the bus on her own several times a week and managed to get to the center without assistance.  Often as I would drive past I would see her scurrying down the street with her straight back and a swing in her walk entirely inappropriate for a woman in her eighties.

That was my mom.  I think some people here may think a person like this was superficial, but I don't believe it.  I have never thought that.  She lived according to her philosophy of life which was expressed in a song she used to sing me as a child.  Have any of you heard it?  It goes like this:
 

And when she died, folks, she had a look of rapture on her face.  She was the lady who always managed to accentuate the positive.

Is there a negative side to all her fun?  My dark side would say yes, but not here, and it was always very hidden.  Very hidden, not just from the public, but hidden from those close to her, too.  So I will continue her tradition here.  I loved her, and doing her obituary means, inevitably, accentuating the positive.  Let me say, though, that I didn't start college until I left home, married, and had a child.  Before that, I danced.  But college always felt like the right place for me.  Neither my mom nor my dad could understand that, but I feel they loved me anyway.

One more picture.  It's from last year, wearing a kind of funny hat at a holiday party

Goodbye, mother.  I'll miss you.

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