Grab-Bag Quickie

At work. I need a little break from writing, so I thought I would write on my blog.

Yo dawg, I say you like writing.

I like the idea of some shorter, structured posts. I have Future Fridays (awesomely alliterated!), which have potential to be a blast. How about a Grab Bag Quickie? I'll take a topic (and please suggest topics, gentle readers) and search on Google with the I'm Feeling Lucky button, or if a topic doesn't strike me, I'll go to a random article on Wikipedia. And I'll try not to cheat. Also, I'll choose how to use a topic.

Today, I'll write on the Grab-Bag Quickie for 10 minutes--that's what I have left on my break.

Alright. This is a challenge. Timer is going.

Today's Grab-Bag Quickie Topic Seed: Karl Leister, German clarinetist.

Hmm. German clarinetist. Okay, let's see where this goes.

My mom plays the clarinet. Or, she did, in high school. She would pull it out when my sisters and I were little, and us girls would play with it, or really, make it go HONK after much effort, then my mom would wow us with her scales. We were kind of a musical family, sort of half-heartedly so. We had a keyboard growing up--no space for a piano, really. I took lessons, and my younger sister did as well, from the same teacher. I hated that teacher, (how cliche, I know, I know) and the minute she tried to cajole me into practicing by saying 'well, your sister is getting ahead of you in the work book,' I said see ya, lady. I don't know if my mother was ever disappointed that piano lessons never really took; she never really let on either way.

Yesterday was my mother's birthday, and after we had dinner and cake, the year book came out. Oh, there were some wonderful pictures in there, and some hairdos that I just died over. That got me thinking, about where my mom is in her life, and where I am in mine. Her mother, my grandmother, died three years before I was born. My mother never got to call her mother, at three am, with a screaming baby, seeking advice, comfort or just her mom's voice. Now that I have a Darling Monster of my own, I don't know that I ever called my mom at three am, but I definitely called her frantically when Baby Monster had a fever, or when I couldn't remember a recipe that I swore I wrote down last time, or for whatever reason. It hadn't ever struck me what it must have been like for my mom, to be 2,000 miles away from her childhood home, with a small baby, and then two and then three small children, and essentially going it by herself.

So, Mom, if you are reading this, thank you. It must have been difficult, but it didn't really show.


Ha.
There goes the timer.
Toodles, peeps.