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Note: Remembrances of Dolores
My Mother was a very friendly personality and very easy to talk to. All of the kids in the
neighborhood and my friends wanted to hang out with my Mom because she would sit and
play cards & board games with them, tell them jokes & generally treat them as equals. She
always treated me the same way; and, I felt that I could tell her anything.
She had my Dad totally figured out. If I couldn't get what I wanted from him, believe me,
she knew how to get it. They were totally cute together. He used to take her out every
Friday evening for dinner & I got to go along, too. She took forever to get ready...I mean
FOREVER! But; my Dad knew how to deal with her, too. He would start calling her up
after lunch and start urging her to get ready. Somehow, by the time he got home around
5:00 pm, she always still had a thing or two left to do to be totally ready. When I look back
on it now....I realize what an unbounded patience he had, because in all the years that this
ritual took place, he never once lost his temper; and, we would go out to a good dinner
at some place that they really liked and enjoy it. This is a tradition that I have kept up with
my children; and, I still thoroughly enjoy it.
She was artistic. She liked to draw, write songs and play musical instruments, which she
could pick up & actually start to play after fooling around with them for a half an hour or so.
She liked to invent designs for jewelry. You could see that West Virginianess in her too,
although she rarely talked about the place. She once helped my daughter, Michelle, put
together a Terrarium for the heck of it. Michelle liked to catch the little lizards and things that
lived around the yard; and, wanted to keep them. My Mom taught her how to make a home for
them; and, how to catch flies in midair with a dishtowel to stun them, so they could be fed to the
lizards alive. Michelle just thought that was the most!
My mom never liked her real first name, May Ada, I guess; because when she was about
15 years old, after both her parents died, she re-invented herself as "Jean". She did such a
good job of it that even her brothers and sisters called her "Jean"; and, that is the name that
my Dad always called her. I thought this was a great idea; and, since I didn't like the name
Dolores as much as she did.....I did the same thing when I was about 14; and, started to call
myself "Dee". I learned from her how to do it and have used that name ever since.
My mom was the kind of mother who went to the P.T.A. meetings and all of the rest of it.
She taught me the alphabet & how to write my name before I went to school. She took me to
Kindergarten before it was a required thing, like now.
My mother, having grown up basically on her own, never threw anything away. She wouldn't
even throw away old clothes...she would remove the buttons & zippers and either use what
was left as a pattern to make another one, if she really liked it, or use it for a dust cloth until it was
definitely used up. If you ever needed a button, zipper, screw, nut, bolt or anything she not only
had it, but, amazingly, knew right where it was.
When my Mom died, at 67, I knew I had lost the one person who was always in my corner,
no matter what. The night she died, I saw her in a dream & she was young & beautiful & looked
to be about 35 years old. She asked me, in the dream if I was coming with her, to which I replied
in the negative; and she then faded in the distance. But, the dream was great because it helped
me to remember her as the vibrant person that she always was in life. I knew it was a gift from
her in parting, until we meet again.
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