Fair warning: Don’t read this post if you don’t believe that everyone should behave properly in public; it’ll just make you mad again.

And now you’ve been warned.

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Happy Birthday, Mom. You really haven’t changed all that much.

This is my mom and dad. They were still in high school. I think Dad borrowed that car from one of his older brothers.

Mom’s away on a trip right now, with some of her friends. She loves those Happy Traveler tours; you’ve seen them. When those buses pull up to a restaurant or gas station or rest stop, ten thousand red hats pour out and head for the restrooms. One of them is my Mom.

When she gets back, I’ll bring her some potato soup and homemade bread for her birthday. She likes that better than cake and ice cream. Really, she does. And that’s good, because she has no business eating a lot of cake and ice cream because she has ‘sugar.’ That’s what she calls diabetes.

I’m so glad Mom has so many friends to travel and hang out with. Most of them are ladies she’s known since she was a kid; they’ve all been friends for over sixty years. I hope you and I will be so lucky.

Mom and her friends have been my Girl Scout leaders, Sunday School teachers, etc, ever since I can remember. When I look at them now, they all look almost exactly the same to me as they did then. I’m not going to tell them that, though, as it’s hardly flattering.

When someone I haven’t seen in ages sees me and says I look the same, I want to go home and stick my head in the oven. I mean, do they really mean that I’ve always been this fat and this jowly? NO, it just can’t be true.

It’s not. I know that. But even so. . . . . And I know what they mean when they say it. They mean what I mean about Mom’s friends. I know they didn’t really look like that in their twenties and thirties, but since the change was so gradual, and because anyone over twenty might as well be eighty-seven to a little child, it seems like they’ve always looked like that.

Not me, though. I don’t WANT to have looked like this for very long. It’s bad enough NOW!

Also, does anybody else think that a hospital emergency room that doesn’t have and can’t seem to find any bandaids is more than just a little bit scary? There was no blood pressure instrument in there, either.

And can someone please explain to me why hospital architects design all those little examination rooms to be directly across the hall from each other? And why must people who are probably very polite under normal circumstances turn into peeping toms in an emergency room? The people in the room across the hall from Hub last night stared as though they were watching television. It was awful. So incredibly RUDE.

And their eight dozen little kids were just plain nasty. Running and screaming and yelling and lying on the floor having tantrums. . . . .I know they were miserable but they most obviously were not being raised by MY mother. She would have had them sitting quietly and politely and she would have done it without even raising her voice. Believe me, I know. Too bad more parents don’t teach their kids to behave properly in public. If one of us had behaved one-hundredth as badly as those kids last night, it would have been the very LAST time, because she would have taken us out into the parking lot and ‘reminded’ us how civilized people act. And then she would have come back in and rewarded all the GOOD kids right smack in front of the bad ones.

I really think that many of the world’s problems could be solved if the good kids got rewarded and the bad kids didn’t. And maybe if the bad kids saw what the good kids got, they’d try harder to be good. And if the good kids saw that the bad kids got nothing (and rightly so, too!) they’d try to STAY good lest they lose out.

Too many bad kids get things they don’t deserve, and too many good kids DON’T get things they deserve. When did this start happening on a regular basis? WHY DOES IT STILL HAPPEN? It’s wrong in a zillion different ways.

And when I say “kid” I really mean “person in general of any age and under almost** any circumstances.”

To hell with free self-esteem. To be worth anything, it’s got to be earned. Every child in the world knows that. When will the adults learn?

Sorry about the rant. Happy Birthday, Mom.

I’m not really sorry about the rant. I firmly believe it to be absolutely true.

Hub’s feeling a lot better today. He’s still snarfing down the pain pills, and doing a lot of wincing, but aside from the pain, he’s much better. I think just knowing what was wrong in the first place eased his mind. It could have been so much worse. . . .

Thank you all for your concern. It was much appreciated.

**You know perfectly well what I’m talking about in this post.