Good Stories for Mama's Day

My mother, Dorothy, and grandmother, Kate, circa 1913 Havre, MT.

My mother, Dorothy, was a good story teller. I believe it was a family tradition that traces back to Ireland on my mother's side. She also possessed a psychic ability, or at the very least a superstitious tendency that she inherited from her mother whose parents were both from the Emerald Isle.

I never knew my grandmother, Kate, who according to family lore would turn around and go home if a black cat crossed her path. She birthed 10 children in Havre, Montana. Nine survived. Seven boys and two girls. My mother told of laundry freezing on the clothes line and the earthen floor in their home that was heated by a coal-burning cook stove.

One morning at the age of 13, I had just returned from my morning paper route when my mother confronted me in the kitchen. "I had the strangest dream last night," she said. It was one of many meetings between us where I felt a special confidence, as though what she was telling me was a secret or important message.

"I heard a voice," she said, "repeating, 'Father Ronald is dead. Father Ronald is dead.' Followed by the number 51."

Her hazel-colored eyes beneath dark eyebrows peered straight through me, to the point where I was hearing the voice in her dream, her words echoing in my mind. I visualized a script of repeating numbers floating through dark space... 51, 51, 51.

A day or so later we learned that her brother Ronald, a Jesuit priest, had died of heart failure. He was 51.

On another occasion, my mother approached me with intriguing news. "Judy Garland has married Mark Herron. He may be your cousin." That was like telling me he was my cousin.

Judy Garland was the girl Dorothy in the movie, The Wizard of Oz. She became an actress, singer and entertainer who was married five times to different men, Herron being her final husband at the time of her unfortunate death at age 47.

I do have a cousin named Mark Herron, whom I finally met years later, but he was never married to Judy Garland. But it was a good story.

My life opened to a new world when I was 8-years-old and my mother introduced me to the Pomona Public Library in the town where I grew up.  I found a children's section that was full of books about interesting people. I got hooked on reading biographies of famous Americans, although they were all men.

I went through the whole bookshelf: Davy Crockett, Francis Marion, Lewis and Clark, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison, George Washington Carver, Henry Clay, Daniel Boone and more. That's where my love for books began and I thank my mother, who always had one or two open books laying around the house.

There's nothing like a good story, but a good mother beats it all. Happy Mother’s Day, Mama!