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Michael McLeod
As it happens my mother was a doctor's daughter who gave me her father's unused prescription pads after he died so I could scribble on them as a child - my first efforts at expressing myself on paper.
His name was Ernest Reutinger; he was an old-school general practitioner who had a home office/examining room in an addition that jutted out from my grandparent's red brick two story home on east main street, just next to st catherine's church and school. I still have his stethescope and a small, old school, zippered leather bag that he may have kept pills in.
My mother was a lovely giving and extremely well educated soul whose favorite times were spent chatting in the sun with a small ladies group that included ruth ertel, my first grade teacher at immaculate conception grade school on east north broadway. They would spend summer days in that old-school housewives congregation on the rest areas surrounding the sprawling olympic swimming pool near our home. We lived so close to the sprawling olympic swimming pool complex on indianola that we could hear the hourly announcement over the loud speaker:
"It is now time for the (whatever) o'clock break. Let's have everyone out of the water. Parents and adults are invited to swim during the break "
Of course I know it by heart. I heard that announcement all summer long, either from poolside, when i had to grudgingly get out with all the other kids for the break, or from my bedroom window; that's how close we lived. It's a cherished childhood mantra, that announcement, connected to those three months of freedom and warmth we longed for an embraced so joyfully as kids.
My mother loved swimming and working on her tan in the summers and playing bridge with friends on the poolside lawn at Olympic. She was a class act who took us to the library as children, and I came home with books filled with stories --for all I know it was those trips, that early encouragement to read, that triggered the storyteller in me. I had many a mentor in various newsrooms over the years, but any time I won an award for my work, I sent it to her.
I'm certainly not being pushy about it but I'd love it if others would like to say a few words about their own mom.
I've just had such a strong sense, all my life, that any good you see in me came from her.
I'm oversimplifying, and lord know my father was a hell of a man, but I'll never get over that feeling of connecting to my mother's caring, intelligent, embracing soul.
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