David Lee Roth, BR5-49 and Salt Dishes

I miss my mom.

She was just inherently cool.

Really.

When I was in high school and I'd come home late from whatever it was I did on those nights....my dad would sometimes be asleep already and she and I would sit at the kitchen table and talk.  Sometimes I'd play music.  She liked it when I played David Lee Roth doing Ice Cream Man.  I ask you....does it get much better than that?

And I think I've already said here that she was the one that told me to check out BR5-49 on Lower Broadway in Nashville when they were just starting out.  We were heading to the late lamented Nashville Tailgate antique shows and she had seen something written in the Tribune about them.  I think that was the trip we also got together with the Mavericks and saw them play some TV show at the Ryman.  My mother couldn't wait to hear about it all.  She kept track of all these things.

In recent years she's bemoaned the fact that she didn't keep track of current music anymore----I had to break it to her that I didn't either.

She was born with the collecting gene and passed it on to me more than my sisters.  I was twelve when we were at an antique shop and she pointed out some little glass salt dishes.  I picked one out for a dollar and well.....here we are today with a houseful of glass and antiques.  She and my father indulged me terribly and when I think about how much I've spent on Lego or trains I just recall the $1 salt dish that quickly escalated into glass costing far more than a dollar....

We had a wonderful time collecting together though.....more antique shows that I could possibly count....and it was the era of a LOT of antique shows.  The fall season started out with the show in Wheaton I think, then of course the Fox Valley shows, and Naperville and LaGrange and the O'Hare show was a different animal back then....as well as the Arlington show....and Pheasant Run and Day in the Country----my mom and Judi and I always went to that one---and many, many others.  Now that we buy antiques we pretty much can whip through a show pretty quickly...but we didn't back then....we'd go and look, leave my father tormenting some poor dealer with his long stories, stop for a bite to eat, look some more.....it was wonderful.

It was one year when Ernie and I were in Maine and stayed overnight in a little cottage on Route 1 that I called my mother in great excitement to tell her that we were near Old Orchard Beach and that I'd always wanted to go there.  When we would visit my grandparents in Maine I would always hear radio commercials for Old Orchard Beach and desperately wanted to go.  The next time she and my father went to Maine she proudly called me from a hotel right on the beach in Old Orchard.  It quickly became our favorite and for a year or two we planned our trips to overlap a few days so we'd all be there at the same time.  The rooms had kitchenettes and I swear I made some of the best meals of my life there for the four of us.  I can't exactly recall the recipe but there was one meal we talked about for years----it was swordfish with wild Maine blueberries----and I think kind of a sweet sour lime marinade....can't remember it exactly but even the week she died we talked about that trip and how good those dinners were....

I have been well and truly blessed with my family and I know that the price you pay for that is sorrow when they are gone....

I guess I need to welcome that sorrow because the greater it is the greater the love.