Nice Single Moms Work At Home photos

A few nice single moms work at home images I found:

6: bible nerd


Image by jamelah
The fact that I know the Bible as well as I do seems to be an inevitability of my lineage. My grandfather, who was born in 1911 in rural Arkansas and only went to school through the third grade died when I was seven, though he remains the most deeply intelligent man I’ve ever known in my entire life. Since I had a single mom who worked, I spent much of my childhood at my grandparents’ house, and remember that each afternoon, my grandfather would sit at the head of the dining room table with his Bible and his books and his notebooks spread around him. His hands shook, maybe because of age or maybe because of some side-effect of the diabetes that eventually killed him, but either way, writing was a chore for him. He wrote with his right hand and tried to hold it steady with his left, which must have been an incredible nuisance, but not enough of one to keep him from recording his notes on his reading. When he died, my mother inherited his beloved books.

My mother was educated at a seminary and spent much of her early adulthood teaching. These days, she spends her mornings with her Bible, reading. When I was growing up, I of course went to church every Sunday. When I was in 4th grade, the day before spring break, I got busted for lying and my mom made me spend the entire week I was off school with a Bible and a concordance writing down every verse on lies, lying and liars, and I had to recite a new one from memory every day when she came home from work. I would’ve much preferred being grounded like normal kids, but normal was not our kind of thing. It was probably a much more effective punishment, anyway. Do you know how many verses I had to write? I don’t either, but it was a lot.

Anyway, I got this Bible one year for Christmas. Maybe I was 18? I’m not sure. I call it my preacher Bible because it’s this huge black leather-bound monstrosity that weighs about a billion pounds and seems like it would be good for banging on a pulpit. (A billion pounds? How do I lift it? Well, as one of my uncles charmingly says, I am strong like an ox. No really, that’s what he says. I guess that means you probably don’t want to arm-wrestle me.) It is stuffed full of scraps of paper on which I have taken notes and also full of underlined passages and writing in the margins, because I am a big fan of writing all over my books — each one is like its own diary. Though I’m not particularly religious and I haven’t been to church in awhile (I don’t think I’ll ever stop going entirely; it’s nice having an extra family), I am grateful for the love of study and the knowledge of this book that has been instilled in me by my family. No matter what I believe at any given point in time, I can always find something good to read here. There was a time when I thought I would follow in my mother’s footsteps and get further education at a seminary, but I changed my mind since I’m really too much of an argumentative, opinionated smartass liberal to fit in, probably.

Also, since I was an English major, I sometimes get into exegesis just for kicks when I’m bored. You know, because I’m a nerd.

lady


Image by jamelah
Lately, my grandmother has been going through her things and dividing them up to give to her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren so they will have something of her when she’s gone. I’ve helped with this a little bit, and it’s a strange process, because the world without my grandmother in it is something I don’t want to think about. But I find myself hanging onto the things she says — even throwaway comments — more and more. A few weeks ago, I was driving her back home after an appointment with one of her doctors, and after a long silence, spent staring out the passenger windows at the trees showing off their autumn colors along the sides of the road as we zipped past them, she said, "Today would’ve been my 75th wedding anniversary. I remember that night, walking home, and the moon just shone and shone."

Last week, we were going through a cedar trunk filled with things dating back to the mid-1950s, and she gave me a stack of her old handkerchiefs. Delicate little embroidered and painted things that I have absolutely no use for, but will treasure anyway.

My mother was a working single mom and my grandmother had a large hand in raising me. She spent a lot of time trying to teach me how to be a proper lady. A Southern lady. (It’s funny, because I was born and raised in Michigan, so I am not even remotely Southern, but my grandmother, although she has been living in Michigan since the mid-1940s, will always be entirely Southern.) She taught me how to sew, she taught me how to embroider, she taught me how to make a pie, and, most importantly, she taught me how to make biscuits. (I cannot live in a world without warm biscuits and honey.) Other than these things, I don’t know how well her Southern Lady Lessons went over, though it is true that if I spend even 5 minutes in the presence of my relatives from the South, an accent will emerge and I’ll catch myself uttering sentences like "Y’all come on down t’the house when you’re through" and wondering where the hell it comes from, but knowing exactly that I have little control of the shape of the English language that comes out of my mouth sometimes, because the one that comes from family is the strongest dialect of all.

That’s all a tangent. Anyway, here are the handkerchiefs. And my hand. The end.

Somehow I stumbled across the “San Diego Comic-Con” group, so I had to go dig up this memory….


Image by Vaguely Artistic
It was 1988, and I think the only reason we even went down to the SDCC was because Matt Groening was going to be there (any excuse for a road trip.) I’d been a Life in Hell fan since the early 80s, and this was my all-time favorite — I swear to God this was the scene in my house every single day my mom came home from work.

Around 1985 a roommate was a waitress at Canter’s, and Groening came in one night. He left behind a paper place-mat covered in doodles, including an early, crude Bart look-a-like, and she brought it home for me. The funny thing is, I think it was supposed to be meant as kind of a slight, actually, as in, "Here, I brought you some trash from work."
I have it framed — I wonder if he would actually sign it….

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