I am so very pleased to bring this book to you....NORA 102 ½: A Lesson on Aging Well by my friend and fellow author, June Shaw. This inspirational memoir is about June's mother!
Learn secrets to aging well through one spunky woman's journey through her senior years.
Enjoy my mom. She danced till the end!
“Did you hear that?” Mom asked.
“They want all single women to go up. The bride is about to throw her
bouquet.”
I glanced at Bob. We weren’t
married and didn’t live together but had been a couple for years. Mom loved
him, but I didn’t believe she’d want us to get married. We’d both married
before and had grown children. Remarriage might complicate things.
Mom grabbed my hand. “Come on,
June. Get me up there.”
The day before this we’d
celebrated her ninety-sixty birthday.
Grinning, I guided her to a group
of teenage girls and some in their twenties and thirties. The bride, Mom’s
lovely great-niece, stood with her back to this bubbly gathering. I stopped Mom
behind the half-circle of females and waited near so no one would accidently
back up and knock her over.
The bride lifted her bouquet and
tossed.
The bridesmaid in front of Mom
caught it.
Mom reached above the girl’s head
and yanked the flowers out of her hands.
My mouth fell open.
All of the young women looked at
Mom. I tried to judge their reactions but couldn’t.
The bride turned. “Oh, Aunt Nora,
you caught my flowers. That’s fantastic!”
I watched in disbelief as my
mother, in her turquoise dress and black pumps, posed with the thrilled bride
while holding the bouquet of jumbo white roses she stole and said nothing of
her guilt while the photographer snapped their picture.
The bride gave Mom a kiss and
moved off to her new husband.
“Mom,” I said, “you know that
picture will go in the bride’s album to show who caught her bouquet, right?”
“I know.” She grabbed my fingers.
“We’d better go find out who really caught these flowers so we can give them
back.”
Oh,
good grief.
I easily located a bridesmaid who
showed me who’d caught the flowers my mother stole. We walked up to the young
woman, and Mom held out the bouquet. “This is yours.”
I wore an apologetic face.
My mother did not.
Relief sank into my chest when
the girl’s boyfriend held up his hand. “No, you keep them. We don’t want them.”
My mother showed off her stolen
bouquet for days afterward to everyone who visited her home.
***
People became captivated by this
woman whom God decided would become my mother.
She seemed ordinary to me—like a
mom—until much later. How strange it was that she changed so much during her
later years.
Or did I?
I needed to look for clues in
this mystery to determine how my ordinary mother became so much fun.
She’d been saying her vision was
getting worse. Months after the wedding where she snitched the bouquet, we
heard of a vision specialist with a new procedure in Baton Rouge. Mom had seen
a specialist a year before who told her nothing could improve her vision. Here
was new hope, I suggested. She was an optimist but also a realist and said he
couldn’t help. We would try anyway. Bob drove us there. When they called for
Nora Shaw, I walked to the back with her.
In a room with a wall chart
topped with the huge E, a young woman
stood five feet in front of Mom. “Can you tell how many fingers I’m holding
up?”
My mom, a bright woman with steel
gray hair, tightened her lips and stared at the hand. I couldn’t believe she
looked ready to flunk a test most kindergarteners could pass. The majority of
them could tell that they saw two fingers. Was my mother’s vision that poor? I
had tried to comprehend how little she could see, but until now couldn’t
imagine how difficult her everyday life was. What kind of daughter was I?
Say
two! I wanted to
yell from my chair backed into the corner. Mom,
she’s holding up two fingers.
The woman took three steps closer
to the examining chair. “Miss Nora, can you tell me how many fingers I have up
now?”
Mom sucked in a breath. “Two?”
Relief washed through me.
“Good,” the woman told her,
although I almost said no, my mother’s reply was great. But I knew it wasn’t.
What I witnessed let me know for certain how much of her vision macular
degeneration had snatched during these last few years.
The doctor couldn’t help her. She
accepted his response as though she wasn’t surprised. I, on the other hand,
needed to deal with knowing my mother had become almost totally blind. Visually
impaired. Handicapped.
She didn’t seem that way.
The loss of most of her vision
seldom stopped her from enjoying life. She might have hired a young buck of
fifty or so to go over and read to her at home—but she didn’t stay home long
enough.
One thing most experts on aging
agree on is that to age well, people must have adaptive coping skills. Most
people encounter many problems, but instead of letting them overtake us, we
need to adjust and go on.
One thing that made Nora Shaw so
special is that as long as she was alive, she lived.
Hope you enjoyed this Tuesday Treasure. Until later....take care & God Bless!
PamT
3 comments:
What an amazing lady! We can all learn much from her example.
Thanks, Jacqueline. She was definitely someone to learn from.
Pam, thanks for the mention and excerpt of the book about Mom! I'm sure she'd love it!
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