Cherish your mother on her special day
This time of year I have a bad case of Mommy envy. No, I don’t wish I were a mother, I wish I still had mine. While she drove me crazy nobody ever loved me as much as my mother. Now that she is gone I look back at the things we argued about and wonder why I thought any of it was important.
Longevity isn’t something that runs in my immediate family. My mother was just 59 and my dad was 66 when they died. My oldest brother, Rocky Hill, died at 54, he would have been 68 on Monday. As near as I can tell, I am living on borrowed time.
Life is precious and fleeting. What happens to us after our earthly vessels expire? Séances and ghost stories would have us believe there is existence after death.
My mother, QuoVada Hill, believed that death was just the next step in the great adventure of life. She had many beliefs that were not quite mainstream. Her specialty was astrology. She often said astrology was not a religion one believed in, but a science one studied.
She cast horoscopes based on the exact time and date a person was born. In the early 1970s she had a radio show on K-HOT, Madera’s local AM station. The opening introduction of each episode was a spooky trill of music and then the words “Astro-Analysis by QuoVada … (in an echo chamber)”
Then she would report, sign by sign, what events would transpire the following week. She was eerily accurate, or so her listeners claimed.
She came by the job almost by accident. One day, radio disc jockey Ross Thornton tried to phone an out-of-town astrologer and was unsuccessful. Mom called the station and told Thornton of her talents.
She then gave him what she called a thumbnail sketch of his personality based on his sun sign. The sun signs are the 12 houses of the zodiac that are established by a person’s birth date.
The personal horoscopes she cast for clients took into account the exact positions of all the planets at the moment they were born. How much of what she wrote was based on her views and how much relied on planetary positions is anybody’s guess.
I truly wish she had lived long enough to experience the Internet. She mistrusted early computers that controlled medical billing and public utilities. But she would have come to love the World Wide Web. She subscribed to magazines containing charts of the precise locations of the planets. None of it made sense to me. Had she had access to the Internet, she would not have needed the magazines.
At the end of each segment, she would identify a local celebrity born under the current sun sign. She spent a great deal of time seeking out the birthdays of local people and keeping records in short-hand notebooks.
She and my brother Brian had a very special connection. One night, they took the Zener psychic card test. Zener is a deck of five cards with a square, circle, star, plus sign and wavy lines printed on them. Brian looked at the cards and Mom concentrated on the images. She consistently got four out of the five cards correct. She also got a bad headache. She was a bit spooky at times.
Spend all the time you can with your moms. Once they are gone, they are gone for a long time.
Have a happy Mother’s Day and a great weekend.
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Readers may contact Tami Jo Nix by emailing tamijonix@gmail.com or following @TamiJoNix on Twitter.
