My mom passed away Feb. 11, 2013 at 7 a.m. She was 87 years old and finally after nine brave years lost her bout with lung cancer.
She read everything I wrote, and always had her opinions. I am glad she lived to read the dedication to her in my novel, "Whistling Past the Hottie Graveyard." She read all those Hampton Traditions pieces I wrote over the years and really loved the Sag Harbor history pieces too. When I was writing about the beauty of Montauk for the now defunct Montauk Pioneer, she actually started to come out to Montauk to visit and we use to sit on the bench at Ditch Plains Beach. I lived just a few hundred yards from that bench then.
She couldn’t really walk so we would sit on the bench and she would critique my most recent articles. In my wheelhouse era of activity, she would read all eight to nine articles running each week, always asking why I never was in any of the photos.
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She never did grasp Southampton Patch articles, because navigating on her computer in the latter years became a chore. She actually wanted me to establish a paper on the East End, until I explained that print journalism is a downward trending industry.
I will say this, when she disliked an article, she let me know about it.
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I skied with her and my dad in Italy, Switzerland, France, out west, and of course at Killington, VT, where she and my dad had a fine place for 25 years. We even won some mixed doubles tennis tournaments, of course weighted to our level.
When we fished with dad and my brothers off Montauk, she almost always went out, staying up on the bridge with my dad. She was never bad luck, because back then the tuna was so plentiful. She drove me to Boy Scout camp, and once in a high school hockey game fight went out onto the ice to fetch my glasses, as I was in a huge scrum a few yards away.
She was proud when I worked on Capitol Hill and even more so when I graduated George Washington University. She thought I should have tried to be president of the United States — after all, she was my mom and that’s how moms feel.
It was she who told me I should marry my present wife, Cindi, because she saw immediately what a team we were. She lived long enough to attend our wedding 10 months ago. She always said, “You only have one mother!” and now that one mother is gone. I will forever see her on that bench with a blanket watching the endless waves roll in.
