And a very happy little Mother’s Day to my birth mom, Cherie.

I’m guessing she will celebrate today with a 6-pack of beer and a pack of Pall Malls and some old style Country & Western music, as she contemplates how she survived giving birth to four babies by the time she was 19 years old…

Okay!!

Mother’s Day is not my favorite day of the year, that’s for sure. It’s just sort of a reminder of how difficult it was to try to make my adoptive mother happy when I was growing up — especially on Mother’s Day.

When I was a wee bonny lass, I used to get a weekly allowance from my dad. This was back in the 1960s, when money went a lot farther. Still, for most of my childhood, I only got 25 cents a week (1 quarter). When you consider that a candy bar only cost 5 cents back then, a quarter wasn’t the worst thing to have when you were 7 years old.

Of course, the only thing I ever wanted back then was record albums. And those were just impossible to afford. Even to buy a 45 RPM was about 3 weeks’ worth of allowance money.  But every year on my birthday, an aunt of mine would mail me a birthday card with a $5 bill inside, and that was absolute heaven to me! It meant I could go straight to Woolworth’s and buy a rock & roll record album, which, back then cost about $3.99.

We had lots of record albums in the house because my parents loved music, but they were all jazz, classical, or Broadway musical albums. And a Top 40 radio station was always playing in our kitchen, or in the car, and I loved Top 40. But I really, really loved The Beatles and The Monkees (a TV show). So, once a year, I had to choose: I could buy one of their albums. For instance:

OR

The rest of the year, I had to rely on girlfriends who had older sisters who had way more records than we did.

Then, when I started babysitting when I was 11, I finally hit paydirt and could afford to start buying a lot more albums. My taste in records at age 11:

Anyway. That was a digression.  One of the worst Mother’s Days in my memory was when I was about 7 or 8 years old, and I was able to buy a beautiful blooming red geranium for my (adoptive) mother for Mother’s Day from a florist around the corner from our house in Cleveland. I could get there on my bike.  The geranium was inexpensive enough that I could afford it with money from my own piggy bank. And I was so thrilled. Just thrilled — it was the first Mother’s Day that I didn’t have to borrow money from my dad. And when I gave the geranium to my mother, she looked at it with actual disgust and said, “I hate geraniums.” Then she immediately stuck it on the steps out in the dark garage and then, later, threw it into the trash.

Obviously, I have never forgotten that.

And, btw, she did not hate geraniums — she had plenty of geraniums over the years. She just wanted to be mean to me.  (It worked.) (Then multiply that times every day of my life with her…)

Anyway. So, I’m not a big fan of Mother’s Day.

Still! I did send my birth mom a pretty card replete with messy glitter, full of gushy sentiments of love.

All righty.

So. Yesterday, I had the best chat so far with the director of Tell My Bones, and the arrangements for the Zoom staged reading just keep getting more and more exciting for me, gang. At this point, it’s going to be June before it will be taped/performed. But that’s really just around the corner, and a ton of stuff has to be organized by then.

I was reluctant, at first, to go the Zoom route but now I’m seeing that there are a lot of options to Zoom that can give it a higher quality than what I’m used to seeing. So I am really getting excited.

Okay. Well. Today I’ll be chatting with Valerie for a while in the early afternoon, but other than that, my only plans are to sit here at my desk and focus on two things: Some editing on The Guitar Hero Goes Home (aka Blessed By Light), and do some new writing on Thug Luckless: Welcome to P-Town.  (Plus drink a lot coffee. I hate that it’s gotten so cold again and all the windows need to be closed. That fresh air last week was really helping my brain work again. But, in a pinch, I’ll resort to coffee. Or maybe tea.)

Enjoy your Sunday, wherever you are in the world. If you are separated from loved ones today because of the pandemic, I hope that this time next year arrives in a heartbeat and that all will be well in your worlds once more.

Thanks for visiting, gang. I leave you with my rather unexpected breakfast-listening music from this morning. It’ s kind of a sad song, but it’s still really beautiful to listen to, and I’m not sad today; I just wanted something pretty to listen to. So I leave you with “Foi Na Cruz” from Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds The Good Son album (1990). Enjoy! And have a wonderful day. I love you guys. See ya!

“Foi Na Cruz”