Memories of Raquel Welch

For my mother about her mother.

• Teaching us card games and then not letting us win, especially at Slam
• Picking me up from school when I was sick and dressing Abe up as my nurse to come check on me
• Taking us to Starlight when Mom was working and telling us we needed to give her a Hershey bar so she had the motivation to walk up the hill from the parking lot
• Writing letters to me at camp every summer
• Taking us to K-Mart on Wednesday, senior discount day, at the beginning of the summer to buy four new dresses, one for each Starlight show.
• Always having treats in her purse at the circus or other events we went to
• Her and grandpa being clowns and helping out at our kid birthdays
• Making audio tape stories to listen to at night, and alphabetizing and creating a card catalog for them, a trait I definitely inherited 
• Her camping “system” including meals, checklists, rules for camping, that still heavily influence how we camp today
• Giving us a bag of M&Ms for birthdays, and then saying all the M&Ms with M’s on them were hers because they had her initials on them
• The special grunt she said you had to maketo get the bottom trundle bed come up
• She always said I taught them how to be grandparents by being the first local grandchild
• No matter what country you studied at school, she had something in her house that you needed for your project, and that even the most innocuous things had some explanation ( i.e. the Washburn rock that holds down the bird bath warmer)
• Her continued exhortations (for years!) that there were no rolls in China after I made them for a school project about China
• Playing harmonicas and Holly Dog singing along
• Personalized bags of Easter candy
• Her entertaining us when we were waiting for Mom at the garden center meetings, playing the “dots” game
• Serving Neapolitan ice cream always in slices
• Making separate brownies for me that didn’t have mint in the icing
• Knitting parkas for Little People to wear in dioramas
• If you told her your arm, stomach, head, etc. hurt, she’d offer to stomp on your foot so you wouldn’t think about it anymore
• Robins mean spring, fireflies mean summer
• Chunks of mozzarella cheese go with any meal, especially when pronounced "mozzarelly"
• Teaching me to keep score at baseball games
• "No one ever starved in one meal"
• No holiday is too minor to celebrate (Kansas Day, Lincoln’s birthday, even Arbor Day)
• Waiting to pick me up from sectionals in high school and throwing her apple core under the car, saying it was natural and would decompose
• Her announcement that we were an open and affirming family
• When Bob Dole called after Grandpa died, she asked him if he really did that flip in the Diet Pepsi commercial. (by the way, watch the commercial and notice who else is in it!)
• Her plans to write a sequel to My Life, an expose called "Night at the Rest Home," which was never published.