Good Morning Merry Sunshine
By Lois Trever
I am convinced that I would never have survived without the immeasurable amounts of love (with no strings attached, not expectations or hidden agendas), joy, and comfort that my mother has lavished on me across my entire life. She is a role model that continues to inspire everyone who has ever known her. (mom's preface to Loie's Chapter)
“Good morning, merry sunshine.
What makes you shine so soon?
You shine away the little stars
And shine away the moon.”
-A German Poem
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| Detail from Measure Once, Cut Twice blog featuring art by children at the DeGrazia Studio. |
Dear Janet,
I know you remember hearing that greeting almost every morning of your childhood. When the grandchildren came along, Andrew and Sarah, they loved it too because you continued the tradition. In face this very morning Andrew, now twenty six years old, came bounding up the stairs of the fifty year old house where you grew up, and meeting me just getting up, sang out that very poem, complete to “and shine away the moon.” I was surprised and touched that he remembered it.
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| DeGrazia Madonna and Child. |
However you, the sunshine of our lives, did not shine so soon on the world and us. As you know you were a wanted child. Oh, were you a wanted child. We had wished on first stars and birthday candles and prayed for a child to protect and love. We didn’t know much about teaching or discipline or any of that tough love business that might be needed years from now. We just wanted a darling baby to call our own so we wouldn’t have to listen silently to all those sometimes obnoxious friends who talked incessantly about shoe sizes and allergies and orange juice. That was really boring, but we wanted to have some of that anyway.
The day finally came, a bight end-of-August morning after the absolutely hottest summer on record. I don’t know about records really, but I knew it as the hottest summer ever. We were driving from our tiny apartment in the Irving Park area of Chicago to West Suburban Hospital where I had been born. Folks were standing at the corners waiting for the Irving Park street car to make them work. I was on a high. I wanted to lean out the car window and shout to all those unknowing people, “Look at me! I’m having a baby! We’re going to the hospital right now to have a baby!” I looked out at them eagerly, hoping they would guess. Art would be really embarrassed if I shouted to them because he was often more proper than I. I would soon have to be more proper for my role as a responsible mother.
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| Loie before Janet's arrival in the 1940s. |
You arrived as promised and for more than four years we led an almost idyllic life. We were a little crowded in our one bedroom apartment and on a warm summer night the folks in the apartment across the way would sometimes awaken us swearing and fighting and smashing dishes so close by that in our sleep we often thought it was happening in our own place. We began thinking of a house of our own.
You were the focus of our lives. Oh, Art had his work that absorbed him weekdays and I did a few things other than be a mother, but not much. We lived on a busy street. You never in your four years played outside alone. The park was nearby, and our weekends were interesting, driving to see family and friends or to parks, zoos, or kiddie-land. During those four years you had shown your personality in many ways. You smiled and laughed a lot. Your dad loved to show you off by taking hundreds of pictures of you, almost every one smiling or laughing. The guys at work began to wonder out loud about how we got a kid that smiled all the time.
Note: Okay people, I actually have a full time job and can't just retype the entire book. As a compromise I will take out selections but post the entire chapters as PDF if you're into reading the entire original.
Loie's Good Morning Merry Sunshine
Note 2: play along...how many generations were featured in this blog? Count 'em, THREE BABY! For my posts I use Veranda without bold. For mom's original text I use Arial bold. I tried using colors but it makes my eyes go ga-ga...
