Post Script to MA

I was going to put this in comments but decided it was worthy of another blog spot.

MA informs me that she was never pinned to her boyfriend, Wayne -- they just went steady. She was later secretly pinned to another boy, Jimmie, (that meant that she wore the frat pin on her bra instead of the outside), but Mother found out. In MA’s words, Mother “always knew everything.” Mother had noticed that Jimmie had quit wearing his own pin, so she figured it out.

About her office work, she said that there were 19 girls whom she had hired who were working there when she retired and 3 periodontists, not 2. I know those girls were sorry to see her go because she was like a mother to all of them, helping them with their personal problems as well as training them for their work. MA has always been a great listener and can be trusted implicitly to keep a secret, so I know her second “daughters” really missed her when she left.

Then she told me a story about when she was in college and all the girls were given firecrackers to light at 10:00 p.m. and throw out into the hall. She lost her nerve and flushed hers down the john. That action just proves my point about her -- she always toed the line. I probably would have been the one to come up with the idea of the firecrackers in the first place.

She writes, “I was no angel and did lots of things I shouldn’t have done.” Well, I don’t know what they were (except for the smoking) and don’t want to. I prefer to think of her as the one who always obeyed the rules and set an example I should have followed.