Thinking about my mom, Helen Yonge Lind, on this mother’s day.
She’s been gone ten years, since early 2013, She died a few months before Mother’s Day, and her 99th birthday.
Mother’s Day was always a “problem” because her birthday was May 15, always in close proximity to Mother’s Day. Sometimes they were a week apart, other years just a day apart, as this year.
Meda and I were both busy working, and many, maybe most years, we would try to combine the two celebrations, Mother’s Day and birthday, into one shared evening. It worked well for us, but in retrospect, it also essentially took one of those annual family events away from her.
Here are a couple of photos.
The first photo was taken in about May 1950 by a next-door neighbor who was an advanced photographer with his own darkroom on the side of the garage that, as I recall, always fascinated me.
That little Jack-in-the-Box toy gave me endless laughs! When you turned the crank, it would play the traditional tune, “Pop! Goes the weasel”, ending as the lid popped open and the little spring-loaded monkey would come flying out. I have the sense memory that I was continually surprised and delighted by it!
We’re sitting on the stairs from my parent’s house that led down onto the lanai. You can see one of their rattan chairs in the house behind us, and my mother’s pack of cigarettes on the step next to her.
Meda and I moved back to their Kahala house in 2015 after a total renovation. The stairs are now just a memory, replaced by a deck at the same level as the floor of the house, so that you now just walk out onto the deck, instead of down the stairs to the lanai. Little changes like that help keep the ghosts at bay.
And then here we are 52 years later. We were sitting out in front of the Honolulu Academy of Arts before going in for lunch to celebrate my birthday, which had been nearly two weeks earlier. She was 88.
Both my parents, my mom’s brother, my older sister, and her husband, chose to have their ashes scattered in the ocean. My dad was spread in the ocean just outside the surf line at Ala Moana, the rest around the Diamond Head buoy. I honored their wishes, but it kind of leaves me at loose ends, something I wrote about several years ago.
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I recall, with a heavy heart, the wonderful day that your mother gave George and me the “Grand Tour” of Oahu. She was so very kind and direct. She had the tour down so perfectly. She only rested while we toured the mansion where the leader of Hawaii lived. From the introduction to Ewa, to the air field from that fateful Dec 7 … it is as fresh a memory as the amazing pineapple we tasted that day.
Meda and I also remember Mother’s Day. When we didn’t have any money to get Mom something, we got the idea of decorating the paper napkins that our family used at meals. I’m sure this was Meda’s idea, I just followed her lead. We got a bunch of the napkins from the kitchen and using our crayons, we colored in some of the flower shapes and that were stamped on the paper napkins. They looked a bit like embroidery. Mom loved them. That was when it was just the two of us children, living on Circle Road in Maryland, or maybe there was a third sibling-but he was too young to know that it was “Mother’s Day.” Then, there is the Bible we gave our Mother, that she cherished forever. I often read to her from it during her last days. I have it, now. Meda and I bought it on Mother’s Day, from Stewart’s Department Store (within walking distance from the row-house we were living in). That Mother’s Day fell shortly before we would depart from Maryland to our new lives in Oregon. I’ll send Meda a picture of the signature page, where she signed it for us, with her Everbrook ink pen, “Mother’s Day May 13, 1962.’