Today is the 8th of December and my previous comments on the ‘future’ 8th are moot.
Why did I indulge in the pre-day entry yesterday?
This morning I remembered. I was caught in a memory byway… half-seen, half-unknown. I was standing in my Auntie Helen’s kitchen reading a saying hanging by the door. I am repeating it to myself. It is an easy quote to remember:
Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.
See the smiling woman in the photo, that’s Auntie. Her completely wonderful husband Harry smiles next to her. Uncle Harry taught me to pick bouquets of wildflowers for the dinner table; something I love to do to this day… as they say. The photo captures how I remember them best; happy, at ease, loving.
Auntie was actually my mother’s aunt as Mom didn’t have brother or sisters. It wasn’t until my mother was at the end of her life that I found, and met, mom’s half-brother, Richard Renshaw. Richard and his wife actually attended my mother’s funeral. I made sure that he knew how welcome he would be. Less than a year later he too had passed.
It was truly a pity that my mother would not consider learning about her father’s second family decades earlier. I only learned this family fact from my father in a rather secretive conversation years earlier. He’d reached out to mom’s dad but mom wanted no part of him. From my grandparents’ wedding certificate and my mother’s birth certificate I surmised that my mother was a love child. The marriage was not a love match and by mom’s 3rd or 4th year her parents divorced.
Well, Auntie and Uncle Harry stepped up and became the stabilizing hub of our family wagon wheel. Holiday, vacation days, birthdays, celebration days and sad, funeral days were often spent at their home.
So. These sayings that people hang on their walls – encouraging or not, funny or not – are like the memes we see on Facebook. Memes capture your attention. To me, child that I was, words were as important as anything… except ice cream. Both comforted, confirmed existence, encouraged thoughts.
This particular pre-meme (painted on a 1 1/2 foot x 8 inch board, if I remember) was on display in my aunt & uncle’s kitchen of their ‘camp’ – the Dawson family’s summer house by a lake in Groton, Mass. Or perhaps it was in their main home in Stoughton. Carol, her daughter, would know. (Update – per Carol, this sign was in the main house.)
How deliciously helpful. I repeated this to myself many, many times – prior to taking tests, going to dentist appointments, entering a middle school classroom where the loathed Terry O’Toole waited to ridicule or bully, or when any such undesired experience loomed. Thank you, Auntie.
And I can confirm, unequivocally, that today is the tomorrow that we all worried about yesterday.