{"id":798,"date":"2009-10-24T15:37:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-24T15:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=798"},"modified":"2012-02-27T20:16:25","modified_gmt":"2012-02-28T01:16:25","slug":"a-moms-eye-view","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=798","title":{"rendered":"A MOM’S EYE VIEW"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was going to write something today about Hegel and Obama, about how the spirit of history chooses certain men and women to be great; about how these men and women give themselves over so that the evolving great ideas of history can become manifest. And yea, that does make you think about you-know-who. But then again, Hegel also talked of how the great men and women are not always “good” according to the standards of morality that have evolved presumably by the same forces (where do you even start with that thought? Perhaps Bill Clinton, to get a jump on it . . . ) Well then, if you can’t be great, then as a fall-back, you can always be good.<\/p>\n

My mother, who died a week ago today, was indeed good. Not morally perfect, mind you. But definitely good, very good. I am now going over the family photo collection, and I just came across this shot. And it seemed like a good foil to the Hegelian theme of historical greatness. It’s from “just another day” in my mother’s life, probably taken around 1964 or so. She has just finished a wash in the machine downstairs and has hung my father’s work shirts outside to dry. My uncle’s old gray Plymouth is visible behind them (Mom used to call this car “Bessie”). In the backyard, it is either late fall or early spring, and the peach tree is still bare. But it’s warm enough for one of my packing-crate projects, as you can see below the shirts. I was around 10 or so, and used to go to the factory dock up the street to drag home boxes and crates for various building projects. I think this one was an airplane. At other times I had built ships, submarines, and even multi-story office buildings. Wherever my imagination would take the architect inside of me. <\/p>\n

My mother was following conventional morality to the “T” that day. She didn’t drink, she didn’t flirt, she didn’t go out at night. She stayed home and did all the boring, thankless quotidian tasks, so as to provide a comfortable household for my father, my brother and me. She did her best to make it nice; she planted flowers, cooked fresh food, kept everything clean. She made my brother and me do our homework. She went to PTA meetings. She fed and cared for the dog. According to later social interpretations, she was oppressed, maybe even a chump for not rebelling against the sexual roles and suburban paradigms of the time. And yes, I will agree that it was too bad that she couldn’t have done more with her career, which she gave up when I was born. Supposedly she was pretty good as a corporate accounting technician (with the Okonite Company). <\/p>\n

But what she did do was still darn important, even if it was never fully appreciated or compensated with a paycheck. I know this; I was there. I learned to take a mother like that for granted. Only later on in life did I find out that not everyone had such a mother, such a devoted homemaker. Only later on did I realize that I was being treated like a VIP. Maybe even like a Hegelian VIP (even though I fell far short in my adult years of being a “man of history”). <\/p>\n

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I was going to write something today about Hegel and Obama, about how the spirit of history chooses certain men and women to be great; about how these men and women give themselves over so that the evolving great ideas of history can become manifest. And yea, that does make you think about you-know-who. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=798"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2615,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/798\/revisions\/2615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}