"Double or Nothing"

Sometimes when I call my parents they are solving a disagreement with a bet. My dad will say, "Wanna bet?" He'll bet my mom $20 million over any seemingly insignificant fact, that neither of them will give an inch on. It could be the color of something or something someone said. Sometimes I'll call home and ask my mom how much she owes my dad, and he'll yell from the background "54 million!" He always lets her go double or nothing, that's how the numbers get so high, but every so often she's right and I'll call and she'll suddenly owe nothing! My mom says its good to be silly in a marriage.

It took me a while to come up with a visual for this, but here it is, "Double or Nothing."

"Let's Go Back to the Diner" North Kingstown, RI

This is Day 7 of the mother/daughter collaboration. What I hadn't told you was that for the first 6 days, my mom was completely depressed and not really wanting to continue living. Tonight, I called and she was, "Happy Patty," as my Dad calls her. I'm sharing this now because my Mom asked me to document how she was depressed and now she is "up." I'm not exactly sure when it started, but for at least 4 years, my Mom has had to deal with cyclical depression. Almost like clock work, her disease has her depressed for 2 weeks and then up for 2. It's something we still haven't gotten used too.

Tonight when I mentioned her needing to give me my topic of inspiration, she said happily, "Hmmm, a topic?" She thought about her first dog, Sandy, and then excitedly said, "Let's go back to the diner days." This is when she was a teenager and my Aunt Lou and my Grandparents had restaurants on the same street in North Kingstown, RI. "Your Aunt Lou's Restaurant was a gold mine, and your Grandmother closed her's down after a year, because she didn't want to compete with her sister."

I used to dance as a kid in my Aunt Lou's Restaurant (The Dutch Door), and customers would buy me gifts. My Aunty Lou would take me to the beach to fly kites and to Goddard Park to ride ponies and leave my Mom and Non working. It was awesome.

I have no memories of my Grandparent's diner. All I know is that it was called the "Kingstown Diner," (thank you again google image search, this may be the actual diner) and my grandpa was the chef, he had an oyster bar and clam cakes and chowder for the beach goers, and from what he says, a bunch of house wives would drop off their empty pots in the morning to be filled by him with dinner for the night. That way their husbands would think they had been cooking all day. He loves telling that story. Based on this diner website, diners were actually invented in RI, to feed blue collars working the night shift.

I told my mom about the movie "Julie and Julia," she's up beat enough to want to get out of the house and see a movie. She said, "we should do a blog, then they could do a movie about us, you in Texas and me in RI." I said, "We are doing a blog." "That's great." she said.

Tonight, she was so loud with excitement on the phone that at one point after she said another, "That's a great idea." my Dad's ears perked up and I heard him say in the background, "What's a great idea? All great ideas go through me. " Those care givers are too funny.

Where to? Pontiac Lemans, Rhode Island, 1979

Day 5 of collaboration with Mom.

I called to tell my Mom we sold a painting (Dog Dreaming of Flight, collaboration day #2), she was excited and would take no credit.

Today's painting post, she asked for a painting of our family dog Fluffy. We talked about Fluffy and how he used to jump up in the back window of my Mom's Pontiac (thank you google image search). My sister and I were always without seat belts waving to the cars behind us, or swearing at the bad drivers in Italian (we didn't know we were swearing at the time). My Mom at her tallest was 5'1" and you couldn't see her head when she was driving.

This painting shows many things that I miss from childhood: my Mom driving us around, her playboy bunny grey t-shirt, our dog Fluffy, driving in a car with the windows open, cars without bucket seats, and metal bumpers.

My husband informs me that RI was behind the times with seat belt safety and that they did wear seat belts in the 70s in California.

Dog Dreaming of Flight

It's day 2 of my collaboration with my mom in RI. Yesterday, she asked for bird art, later I learned she was imagining a flying bird. Today she asked for a dog, so I combined the flying birds with the dog. I think the dog is dreaming of flight as is my mom. Our dog fluffy lived till he was almost 19 years old, following my mom everywhere. They were very close and I'm sure he was staying alive to be with her because she had an illness. He died over ten years ago. My mom still got around with her walker then, but had already lost her ability to drive safely, so she was house bound often. Tomorrow, she has asked for the beach.