Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission: Impossible! music) is:
(1) What did your mother really like to do in her work or spare time? Did she have hobbies, or a workshop, or did she like cooking, or reading, or watching TV?
(2) Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook or Google+ post.
My mother was Myra Roslyn (Meckler) Sellers Preuss (1940–1995). I think her favorite thing to do in her spare time was watch TV. As soon as she walked in the house, the TV was turned on. Her favorite things to watch were game shows, sports, Westerns, and mysteries, roughly in that order. Later she got into soap operas (I think primarily due to my sister). But for the most part it didn't matter, as long as the TV was on and making noise.
She also really enjoyed doing crossword puzzles and got me hooked on them. I don't remember her doing other kinds of puzzles, such as word searches or crostics, just crossword puzzles. She enjoyed words a lot and playing games with them.
She loved to travel, domestically and internationally, although she didn't have a lot of opportunity to do much of the latter. She wanted to, though — she used to tell me about her plans to travel throughout Europe without any luggage, just buying clothes in whatever city she was in and then leaving everything behind as she went on to the next city. She enjoyed the adventure we had of living in Australia for two years. She used to claim that she had been to every state except Alaska, so when she was sick with her final illness my grandmother took her on a cruise to Alaska.
She wasn't at all domestically inclined and didn't enjoy cooking much (I recently confirmed with my father that he taught her most of the cooking she knew when I was a kid), but she definitely liked going out to eat. Her favorite food was probably Chinese, but she liked most cuisines, especially if she didn't have to cook them.
She also wasn't really "crafty", but for a period she got into ceramics. She made cutesy wall decorations for everyone in the family. I still have mine, although it's buried in a box somewhere in the house at the moment.
She enjoyed working and being out of the house. When I was very young she had a job inspecting circuit boards on the graveyard shift. Later she had her own bookkeeping business, and she taught me quite a bit about that.
Your mother sounds like she had an interesting life. Great photo of her looking hip :)
ReplyDeleteThanks! My mother was very interesting. I really should ask my father where that photo was taken; I suspect he's the person who took it.
DeleteI love the photo you added. Australia must have been fun and how great it was that she got to visit Alaska to see all 50 states.
ReplyDeleteThanks! Australia was indeed fun and a great adventure; I consider myself very fortunate to have had the opportunity. And she did enjoy the Alaska trip with my grandmother.
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