"If you're not planning on overdoing it for your Mom
today, overdo it for all the rest of us who would give anything to overdo it
for ours" -- Keith Olbermann (from twitter)
This has been a weird day for me. Mother's Day 2012. My first Mother's Day since my mom unexpectedly passed away in a car accident last summer. It has been nearly nine months now, but I don't think I've ever let it totally sink in. Part of me didn't want to. Just too painful. But I have been thinking about her more often lately. In a good way, as part of a natural healing process. It has helped to not only move on from the experience, but to remember the good things about my mom and also to appreciate my family and friends and all the other wonderful people I still have in my life.
And right now, I am not so much sad as I am reminiscent.
So I will tell you a few things about my mom and our relationship. My mom was an avid reader. And she enjoyed writing and storytelling. At an early age she got me interested in all of those activities. I remember her as a young woman, probably not even 25 yet, teaching me how to write my name in crayon. And I remember taking this to extremes and writing my name all over the walls in our house. I even think to this day you can still find a "Billy" hidden somewhere, scratched on a closet wall or in an obscure corner. As I got older, she and I would sit in her room and visit, telling stories and jokes for hours on end. She would give me all of her books and magazines to read. I remember once she told me: "Get used to it, now that you've started you'll end up reading almost every night of your life before bed." Which ended up being pretty accurate.
I also learned from my mom that almost anything can be a story. You didn't have to live in a big city or live a glamorous, fast paced life, to find characters and events that are interesting. While my grandfather -- my dad's dad- could regale you with stories about famous people he knew or all of these magnificent things he'd witness, my mom and her sisters could tell you a story about some random guy on the street that would about make you pee yourself laughing. This was a big influence on me when I first started writing. I never knew much about the world, I am a country hick from a reservation in Montana. About all I knew of life were the crazy things I would do with my goofy friends, so that's what I wrote about at first. Rodeos. Drunken brawls. Chasing women. More drinking. More women. More drinking. I couldn't tell you a thing about writing technique, sentence structure etc, but I could tell a pretty funny story. I probably owe that to my mom and her sisters more than anybody else.
So when I got my first story published, it ended up being a fun, sloppily written tale about a college dropout/sometimes bullrider who was stealing nachos from a convenience store after a night drinking with his friends. Hardly groundbreaking, but it was entertaining and most people, including my mom, thought it was hilarious and, at that time, making people laugh was all I was looking to accomplish anyway. From time to time over the years she would ask me for a copy of it, always giving away the one she had or losing it somewhere along the way. The last time I printed out a copy for her, I really didn't think much of it, it was a few years ago. But after her death last summer, I was cleaning some stuff off of her nightstand, a couple books, a few papers, when I came across the last copy of the story I gave her. I guess it probably isn't much, and it could be that she didn't even look at it for sometime, but I felt a rush of emotion when I saw it. It made me happy to know that up until her death she kept that story on her nightstand with all of her nightly reading material. It made me feel close to her. That I positively contributed to at least one of those thousands of nights in her life that she stayed up, reading and enjoying herself.
