Mother of a lawyer

My older son will be finishing law school in four weeks, taking the bar in approximately 14-15 weeks. He's looking forward to financial independence, and to be honest, so are we! Then we'll have only one adult son remaining to support financially. It would be nice to be able to see some benefit from my new salary. Of course, most of it will go to paying off the student loans. Esteemed spouse has a tendency to collect cartoons with jokes about elderly people rejoicing at finally getting their student loans paid.

You know, I honestly don't mind helping my sons financially, but it's a different world from when my husband and I were their age. We didn't expect help from our parents. First, we knew my parents could not afford to help us, and second, we didn't think it was our right to continue to receive money from parents. There are times my in-laws helped us (giving us a down payment for a house), but we always paid them back. We don't expect my sons to pay us back, except--as I sometimes tease--supporting us when we are old and feeble.

Older son had a funeral to attend this week. His wife's first cousin committed suicide. I guess such a somber event had him thinking of death, especially since his wife's stepfather has end-stage Alzheimer's, and so he asked about our plans--i.e., if both of us died at the same time (which he figured was reasonably possible since we generally travel together when we go out of town), how would things be taken care of? That's sort of an icky subject to discuss with one's children, but my husband put his mind at rest and mentioned a burial policy he'd gotten many years ago. (That was something I didn't know about, but he says he got it following the sudden deaths of my niece and my mother in December 1993. I was too out of it then with grief to know or care, so it's possible he told me and I didn't remember.)

Speaking of my mother, today is her birthday. Had she not died at age 60, she'd be 75 years old today. She looked 75 when she died. Decades of heavy cigarette smoking and alcoholism really don't do much for one's beauty and youthfulness. Her family members tend not to live to be very old, not like in my father's family. Two of my father's sisters lived into their nineties. I don't know about his half-siblings--he had half a dozen of those, all much older than he was.

Studies report that educated people tend to live longer than uneducated ones (better health care, less substance abuse, access to better living conditions). I still wonder if it isn't 90% genes. How could my Aunt SJ live to be 93? She had 13 children, was widowed shortly after the youngest (twins) were born, lived in poverty, cared day and night for a disabled daughter, probably ate lots of greasy carb-laden food, and smoked one cigarette a day. Her sister, my favorite aunt, lived to be almost 92, had five children, buried two of them before she herself died, and buried two husbands many years before her own death. She married one man who sired half her children. He died, and she married his brother. Now she's buried between them and alongside her baby daughter. Her adult son is buried at her head. This aunt smoked until she was in her seventies, and I know she didn't eat like the media tell us to eat. (The people I really don't expect to live long lives--those skinny little women who deliver the news. It hurts just to look at their knobby bones and sharp chins. The only thing fat on those women is their hair.)

Clearly, my thinking isn't linear today. If my mind was a traveler, that traveler's itinerary would be all screwed up. That's okay. It's Saturday. It has rained all day. It's cold again and expected to snow before tomorrow morning. Maybe it will be the last time this season. (Somewhere, Old Man Winter is gleefully rubbing his frozen hands together and cackling and howling like the North Wind.)

Today is also the anniversary of my meeting my husband. It was a lovely Spring night in Louisiana, 38 years ago. I was wearing a green dress that my mother had made me. My roommate in college and I went to McDonald's. Since this was in the pre-drive-through days, I went in to get our order. I'd ordered a fish sandwich, which took awhile, so while waiting, I chatted with the order taker, a tall skinny dude wearing the little white paper cap on his greasy hair. (If you work fast food, your hair is always greasy, and your skin is always broken out. The very air is thick with grease.) The rest, as they say, is history. I still love green, we still eat fish sandwiches at McDonald's now and then, and the order-taker's hair is almost gone. What's left is white. He isn't quite as skinny now as he was then, either. But I'm certainly not the svelte teenager who caught his eye that night. I doubt that girl even exists anymore. S.