Commemoration

Last night I watched a DVD about George VI and his wife Elizabeth. Something about their daughter -- that she is a contemporary of my mom's -- that she has the same name? -- made me cry a bit.

My mom would have been 87 today. She was a small town woman from Rumford, RI who was raised and went to college in the same state. In college at the University of Rhode Island -- then Rhode Island State College, I think -- she met a G.I. from a very different small town in Alabama. They married and ultimately divorced, after having three children (by true coincidence during the same years that the current Elizabeth II had hers, only opposite genders). But Mom would want me to get away from Elizabeth the Queen; Britain was my thing, not hers.
Mom wanted to be a stay-at-home housewife and mother, but circumstances obligated her to pursue her initial career path, teaching, while raising her mixed brood, especially me, since I was not quite five when my parents divorced. My sister, Dianne (nicknamed Dede, for "diaper drencher", by Mom's father), was sixteen and my brother Steve, was fourteen and a half. Steve might have been called "Jeff", but for his birth in Alabama, which gave folks pause at his being called "Jeff Davis".
My advent was in Rhode Island. I might have been "Caroline", save for the fact that it was 1960 and my Republican mother and father (ultimately, they both changed their party affiliations: Watergate did it for Mom) did not want people to think that I'd been named for Caroline Kennedy. I wasn't named for Prince Andrew of Britain, either, just spelled Carolyn -- without a middle name, as was Dede. Steve has the family name, Whitaker. There were no boys in my mother's generation, so like her cousin Joyce Whitaker Sparling, she incorporated her maiden name into her son's.
Mom's favorite things were, more or less in order, peace, common sense, Newman Congregational Church, her children, financial stability, intellectual and emotional fulfillment,her father, Abraham Lincoln, old movies, Perry Mason, fresh raspberries, and ice cream. I think that she would want me to say that Rebecca was her favorite movie.
These topics will be plenty to discuss in the coming days.

More to come ....