Happy Birthday!

 

May 7, 1912 to May 7, 2026, my mother was born 114 years ago today, at the Gentry family home in Century, Florida, all the way north out Palafox to the Alabama line. Mama died in July 2011, two months past her 99th birthday. Her birthday always nearly coincided with Mothers Day, and a fact of life while we shared it was that I always tried to make sure I had both a birthday gift for her and a Mothers Day gift as well.  

Born second child and first daughter, Mama was named Hazel Louise Gentry. Called "Weesie" in her family, she tried to make sure nobody knew about the "Hazel." 

My memories right now are of phoning her when I was away from home on her birthday, including on her fiftieth birthday, during our Navy years, when we were living in Ann Arbor while I was in the MBA program at The University of Michigan. May 7, 1962 it was. After graduation the following year, the Navy PCS'd us to Japan and there were letters and audio tapes back and forth, but no phone calls for the next three years.

We had an interesting life. Looking back with some regrets, I nevertheless would not change one Road Not Taken in Frost's yellow wood, lest it change where I am this morning as I have my magic mug of hot & black on 7H porch, where the air is heavy with humidity as Thursday opens with a Tornado Watch. Working our way through life as it confronts us, we don't realize it at each moment, but the smallest decision and choice can change everything.

What am I remembering this morning? The day in, it would have been 1947 or early 1948 when Mama and I went to look at The Old Place where my father started his life and lived until he was eleven or twelve years old. It was for sale at the Time. That end of W. Beach Drive was two ruts that car tires had worn in the Bermuda grass. We parked our blue 1942 Chevrolet "Aerosedan" down front under a cedar tree that had two trunks branching out. An old family picture around here somewhere shows my father sitting up in the tree when he was five years old, dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy. The last hurricane that went through here took that tree down. 

My parents eventually bought that house back into the family, and I remember going into it again in December 1962 while we were home from Ann Arbor on Christmas Vacation. My father thinking and remembering when he was six years old and showing me where his brother Alfred's coffin had stood before the fireplace in the front room. 

Home that visit, I helped my father take down all the partitions that had been added by owners over the decades as they converted the house into four separate apartments. The look on my father's face when we took down the partition that covered the stairs and everything came back to him. A few years after Alfred's death, the family sold out and moved to Ocilla, Georgia, where my grandfather Pop was a Ford dealer for the next few years before they moved on. Diverging roads in their own yellow woods, all of which are part of what brought me to 7H this morning on Mama's birthday. 

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IDK. Life is Good, and it's short. So be quick to love, and make haste to be kind, because we haven't much Time.

For all of it, RSF&PTL

T90