I was trying to soothe my mother’s anxiety by prodding her into telling the nurses about her wardrobe and about how she had won beauty contests when she was younger. A week ago a friend had written and said that she remembered my mother fondly. And I try to focus on those aspects of my mother, the ones where people know the big hearted woman, who was as fragile as a flower. Later, that same friend wrote and said that she had lost her own father to alcoholism and that in the final days, “it was rough because he didn’t want to be sick, but he didn’t want to quit drinking either.”<\/p>\n
There was an interesting article in the NYT this Sunday by Michael Winerup talking about The Father I Thought I Knew as he tried to reconcile the tyrant with the loving dad. He writes about a young woman who worked with his father on the news desk:<\/p>\n
\nKathy Melymuka wrote that she was a 30-year-old rookie copy editor back in 1980, the only woman working full time on a desk of prickly old newspapermen. And it was my father who had looked out for her and taught her pretty much everything she\u2019d ever needed to know about editing. \u201cHe was wonderful,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThey really, really cared about good language and Harold was the best of them.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe made more of an impression on me than almost anyone I ever met,\u201d she continued. \u201cI would say he was one of the great favorites at the paper \u2014 loved and respected. He was so talented, so funny and so kind.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was trying to soothe my mother’s anxiety by prodding her into telling the nurses about her wardrobe and about how she had won beauty contests when she was younger. A week ago a friend had written and said that she remembered my mother fondly. And I try to focus on those aspects of my mother, the ones where people know the big hearted woman, who was as fragile as a flower. Later, that same… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1kHSD-18B","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4377"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4378,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4377\/revisions\/4378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}