Would have been my mother's 73rd birthday.

I try heartily not to get on my soapbox about smoking (and let's face it, even though I quit in 1984, I was a heavy smoker back when), but now it almost physically hurts me to see people smoke. Especially now, having seen what my mother went through in her dying-- over five months in a hospital, so-called "rehabs," and nursing homes, then finally back to the hospital, all after having destroyed her body with cigarettes. Not just her lungs, but everything-- skin, heart, and especially her circulatory system, which was the thing that ultimately, even if in a roundabout way, killed her on May 4, 2005.

But I won't spend this little memorial space preaching about what could have been. Instead, let me show you a bit of what once was, a long, long time ago:


Click on the picture to get the blown-up version, please, and then again to make it as big as it can get here on LJ.  The dark-haired woman in the back is my mother.  What you're seeing is page 23 from a 1963 cookbook called "So-Good Meals," which was published by Better Homes & Gardens.  No, I'm not the ponytailed girl in the picture; my mother, not being a particularly patient soul, occasionally reminisced that she could have cheerfully throttled the three kid-models, because they kept trying to eat the food (which had been sprayed with varnish).  Times were better back then; in addition to this, my mother did another layout for BH&G, this one an oversized home decorating magazine.  I have it somewhere in the house but can't find it right now.  In that picture, she was dressed in 1960s light blue stretch pants and top and pointy light blue matching shoes, and gesturing authoritatively at a construction worker as she gazed at what she was going to have done to "her" house.

Yeah, things were definitely better for her back in the sixties.

Sleep in peace, Mom.