My Mother (Mom)

I spoke on the phone with my mother tonight. What an amazing woman!

Besides being one of the Obama super-volunteers in the Shenandoah Valley last year, she is active in politics, a book club, and church, and she is always ready to get in touch with a Congressperson or Senator about an important issue (right now that is health care reform). Currently she is helping to make hygiene kits for Church World Service to send to Haiti. My mom loves her computer, uses it judiciously, and was on Facebook long before I was because she wanted to keep in touch with the young people who worked with her on the Obama campaign.

My mom and me in late 1952.

Though she is 82 years old, last summer Mom took a stress test when her blood pressure was high, and the result is that she has the body/heart of a 64-year-old. Did I mention that she swims and exercises four or five times a week?

Sometimes when I think about my mother I just lean back marvel at her drive and intellectual capacity. Her commitment to helping others, a characteristic of both my parents share, never wavers, even in the face of more conservative “why should we do that” type of people.

When people wear their religion on their sleeves, my mom likes to describe herself as a “Sermon on the Mount“ Christian, applying the concepts from that passage to the real world on a daily basis rather than just mouthing the Biblical words.