Happy Birthday, Mom

Here's Mom behind the wheel, my brother and Grandma. They weren't so big on child car safety back in 1960.

That's Mom behind the wheel and my brother and me in the back seat of our awesome 1961 Chevy station wagon. That's the first car I can really remember.

Mom and her rootin' tootin' cowboys, Christmas, 1964.

Today is my Mom's 80th birthday. I'm trying to come up with something witty or punny to say here, but, really, she's just a great, great mom. Roadtrip-wise, Mom was always the facilitator. She's the one who filled the coolers, made the killer potato salad, applied the sunscreen, made us wear big floppy hats, put the flea collars on the pets, dabbed the Calamine lotion on the mosquito bites, painted the Merthiolate on the scrape, relieved car boredom with games of 20 Questions, fixed me a comfy bed in the station wagon when my asthma prevented me from sleeping with the rest of the family in the tent at the campground, made sure I didn't eat any more clams the next day after they really, really didn't agree with me the night before, packed an extra set of clothes for me after I inevitably would fall into a lily pond or tourist attraction fountain, made sure I wrote post cards and thank you notes to Grandma, bought me a Ring Ding every once in a while, cooked the best fried fish I ever ate, listened to the car radio station my brother and I wanted to listen to, played miniature golf ad nauseum with my brother and me, rode a bike on vacation with us when most people over 40 didn't ride bikes, slept on the fold-out cot in our Cape Cod cabin and not on one of the comfortable beds, twisted her ankle on the first day of our vacation and still hobbled along and let us have a great time, let me buy comic books, took me to great museums, got us a tour of NBC studios in New York City when I was 9 years old, always had three square meals for us, told me to come in so I wouldn't get sunburned, over-excited or over-tired, and generally made every family roadtrip we ever took the best times of my life and the inspiration for this blog.