Posts tagged “mom”

When I was about twelve, all of the landscaping at our apartment complex changed one day while I was at school. I thought the new design looked really cool and mentioned it to my mom. She said, “I just can’t believe they let a man do this.” When I asked why, she said, “Men always use railroad ties.”
I had no idea what railroad ties were and assumed it was some sort of neckwear and didn’t put two and two together for at least a decade.
I think about this probably more often than I should.

One of the (very, very many) things that suck about losing your mom before forty is that I remember almost nothing about my own daily life prior to high school. And because my parents were divorced and I only got to see dad for a few weeks in the summer every year, there’s nobody I can ask. I have two sons and am constantly writing (and printing) notes and reminders for them, like, “You loved to eat oatmeal with blueberries and pineapple every morning for breakfast in my forty-two year-old Empire Strikes Back cereal bowl until you were six and decided that you hate oatmeal.” Or, “If you want to make pancakes the right way you have to use the frying pan with the blue enamel.” I would probably collapse in a puddle if I ever found even a single note like this from mom. She was a writer and left hundreds of notebooks and thousands of loose pages of things. She wrote me cards and letters nearly daily from the day I left for college until shortly before she died, but sadly I’ve never found anything along those lines.

#FridayFive: Kathie Gagne

#FridayFive: Kathie Gagne

On the occasion of what would have been her 69th birthday

In Order Categorical

In Order Categorical

I am the very model of a modern major-general.

Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother.
William Somerset Maugham, (b) Jan. 25, 1874

Enlarged

I miss playing word games with my mom.

Another Anniversary

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

What Is This?

davidgagne.net is the personal weblog of me, David Vincent Gagne. I've been publishing here since 1999, which makes this one of the oldest continuously-updated websites on the Internet.

bartender.live

A few years ago I was trying to determine what cocktails I could make with the alcohol I had at home. I searched the App Store but couldn't find an app that would let me do that, so I built one.

Hemingway

You can read dozens of essays and articles and find hundreds of links to other sites with stories and information about Ernest Hemingway in The Hemingway Collection.