Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

My mom was a stay at home mom to four kids until I was about to graduate from high school and my little sister was twelve years old. She had worked at the church (St. Joseph Catholic Church on Procter Street) typing the weekly bulletin and various other secretarial type things for many years and decided it was time for a full-time, paying job.

She enrolled at Stilwell Technical Center in Port Arthur in the Office Education Program in 1974 at the age of 38 and upon graduation went to work at Texaco Credit Union. She worked there for over twenty years and was teller supervisor for many of those years.

Of course, neither of those jobs were her most interesting or most challenging. She also sewed (and still sews) all of my dad's clown suits and character costumes (he is also The Nutty Professor and a wizard of some sort). She has helped my dad create magic tricks and one time, they even made a ventriloquist's dummy. The puppet's name was Root-Toot. (I didn't like Root-Toot. He had big scary eyes and he *slept* in an old brown suitcase. You can imagine how I feel about those damn Chucky movies.)

I called the house the other day and she and dad were laughing. I asked what they were doing (a dangerous question for grown children to ask their retired parents who are home alone all day, but I did it without thinking) and she said that dad was showing her a new trick. In some families, that might be a euphemism for sex, but not my family. I'm sure the trick was a real humdinger involving multi-colored scarves and pulling things out of things and...wait a minute....

Happy Mother's Day, mom!

We love you,
Laurie, Cory and Jamie


(The picture above is from the same batch of pictures as the one of me and my dad and my sister in front of the Christmas tree with my broken leg. If you look in the upper left corner, you can get a tiny glimpse of me in my big-ass wheelchair.)

*Mom and Dad*