At my age, I have lived through many Memorial Day weekends, but of course, some are more memorable than others. One such weekend that sticks out in my mind is the Memorial Day weekend when I was 10 and we camped at Piseco Lake.

The above photo shows my 10-year-old self with my mother and father that weekend, with my cousin David inadvertantly in the far right. We were camping at the Little Sandpoint Campground at Piseco on a campsite right next door to my Aunt Jackie and Uncle Wendell. My uncle took this photo from the top of the new camper on the bed of his pickup truck.

I remember being really excited about that weekend because we finally scored site #33 at Little Sandpoint. That was the primo spot right next to a brook that usually was already booked whenever we tried to camp there. My father was so determined to get site #33 for that weekend, he drove up to Piseco on Thursday night with our trailer, rented the campsite, deposited the trailer, and then drove back home to Rome until we could return there on Friday for the entire weekend.

So maybe we got site #33, but my father also “got hell” from the park ranger when we returned, as Dad described it. The ranger didn’t like it one bit that our campsite was occupied by nothing more than an empty trailer on Thursday night. Really, I don’t think what my father did was all that bad. He paid the rental fee for Thursday night fair and square, so it really didn’t hurt anything, except for maybe a perusing bear that was disappointed to find an empty garbage can on the site despite the presence of a trailer.

During that weekend, I experienced a strange sensation for perhaps the first time in my life. I had built that weekend up so much in my mind, the actual event sort of paled in comparison. Not that it was bad, because it wasn’t. However, I can remember sitting next to the gentle, sparkling brook on that warm, sunny Saturday afternoon and not quite feeling the rush of euphoria that I expected. In a way, I felt sort of disappointed, but it wasn’t because of the park. I guess it was something with me expecting to feel fireworks when in reality, the situation instead created the sense of a pleasant, contented glow.

Come to think of it, this is what life after 50 comprises. I read an article not too long ago that happiness after 50 is different than happiness at say, 25 or 30. Young adulthood tends to be highlighted by euphoric events like marriage, the birth of a child, or a career advancement. By age 50, many of us already have been there, done that. Happiness after 50, the article continued, often is comprised of moments of contentment, like a pleasant afternoon camping at Piseco Lake. I know that would make me happy now!

it’s not so bad getting older. I’m getting wiser in the process.

There is a strange void in my household this week. My two grown daughters both have birthdays this week and neither one of them are here to celebrate it with us.

I know my kids had to grow up sometime, but until recently, late May for me has always involved the rustle of wrapping paper, slices of ice cream cake, and choruses of “Happy Birthday” sung on pleasant, sunny days. It’s kind of sad to know this all has become part of the past.

But on the bright side, our family’s May birthdays have doubled recently. My daughter-in-law and future son-in-law each have birthdays in late May, too. So I still have plenty of chances to wish loved ones happy birthdays, even if it’s across the miles.

I’m still pretty lucky, I guess.

This is one of my favorite pictures of myself as child, even if it’s no longer in the best of shape. (The photo that, not me!) This was taken during the summer of 1965 at the Little Sandpoint Campground at Piseco Lake in the Adirondacks. I was 5 years old, going on 6.

I didn’t always look backwards like this while toasting marshmallows. No doubt the pose was my father’s idea. I can remember Dad getting mad at me during that trip because I decided to pour the contents of my beach water pot over the campfire. Somehow I thought this was a good idea.

My father, mother and myself vacationed each year without fail at Little Sandpoint from the time I was around 2 years old until my parents split up when I was 11. It was a family affair as my aunt, uncle and cousins from Rome usually camped there at the same time as us. Plus, my mother’s aunt and uncle owned a cabin on Piseco Lake that was just down the road from our campground. We had lots of great times there, usually with a large contingent of relatives joining us,

I’ve come to the conclusion that my childhood Piseco forays are the reason I’m so well acclimated to camping today. I love being out in nature and sleeping in a tent. From what I’ve heard over the years, though, there’s plenty of women who DON’T like camping. Many who do so are coerced by their significant others and usually will camp only in a trailer. My parents had a trailer, but the only time we spent in there was to sleep. Why stay inside when you’re surrounded by the beauty of the Adirondacks?

 I finally returned to camp again at Piseco Lake with my own family in the summer of 2003. We still camp there from time to time, as recently as last summer. Somehow, though, the fireplaces are a lot smaller than I once remembered. For years, I remembered the fireplaces as being chest-high as seen in the above photo. Wrong! Now they only come up to somewhere between my knees and waist.

I still roast marshmallows over the fire, but today I usually look forward while doing so..

This photo was taken in front of our house in Rome on my fifth birthday, Sept. 14, 1964. To me, there are two things that are very notable about this photo:

1.  I really hated that dress. The flared skirt was lined with stiff pouffy netting that felt harsh and itchy against my legs. I can still see my mother standing in my bedroom, pulling the dress out of my closet and trying to get me to wear it. When I told her in no uncertain terms that I hated that dress, Mom replied, “Well then, I’ll give it to some other little girl who wants it.” I, course, replied, “Go ahead!”

No, my mother didn’t give away the dress even though she said that. Too bad.

2. I was blissfully unaware then of how badly my feet turned inward as I stood. It didn’t look any better when I walked, either. I was pigeon- toed, just like my mother was as a child. From the time I was 3 until I was almost 12, I wore corrective shoes as prescribed by my podiatrist, Dr. Salerno, who had an office on Liberty Street in Rome.

I think Dr. Salerno’s first name was Michael, but I’m not entirely sure. After all, I was just a kid. It’s not like I greeted him with, “Hey Mike, how ya doing?” My mother would have elbowed me for sure for saying that.

Anyway, I liked my corrective shoes about as much as I liked that dress in the picture. While all the other girls at school wore patent-leather buckle shoes or penny loafers, I wore heavy, clunky tie shoes, although it looks like my mother made an exception for my fifth birthday photo that’s shown above. Oh, yes, and of course, the kids at school picked on my corrective shoes, just like kids tend to pick on anything that’s different from their perceived norm. Then again, I was different from the other kids’ perceived norm even without those funky shoes, so that might have had something to do with it. Now I embrace it, but it was hard to do in elementary school.

Dr. Salerno did his job well and announced that I no longer needed to wear corrective shoes the summer before I started junior high. That was a lucky break because I really didn’t want to enter with Staley Jr. High wearing those shoes.

Wouldn’t you know, two years later clunky tie saddle shoes were all the rage with girls my age? It was the exact same style of corrective shoes I wore in sixth grade that made my classmates sneer. How about that? I was ahead of my time and no one even knew it.

Good morning, Now and Then readers. I have to go out the door in about 45 minutes to go to a fundraiser with my son, but I will share something that’s been on my mind lately.

My next door neighbor uses foul language. A lot. Now that’s the weather is getting warmer and I’m leaving my kitchen windows open, I can’t help but to hear him as he’s standing in his driveway using at least one of The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television in just about every sentence he speaks.

I swear, too, but I leave it mostly for really choice moments when I’m really mad. Maybe it’s some sort of premordial thing, but that’s what I resort to when I’m really angry about something. Somehow it helps to vent my frustrations. Most of the time, though, I choose not to pepper my speech with foul language. After all, I’m in the communications business, right?

I still remember a lesson my father taught me when I was around 11 years old and we drove to Sylvan Beach to visit one of his friends from work. While we were there, another one of the man’s friends stopped by and they started to play pool. Then the man and his other friend started to swear like crazy. My father didn’t and said it was time for us to leave right after the first game was done.

As we drove home to Rome, my father told me that he decided to leave because he didn’t want me to hear that sort of language from the other men.

“People swear all the time because they’re dumb and don’t have much of a vocabulary,” Dad stated.

That has always stuck with me. And I think of it whenever I hear my ^%$# neighbor in his driveway,

Seeing John Wise’s obituary the other day reminded me of my brief tenure as a drummer in Rome City Schools. For some people, it probably wasn’t brief enough.

Mr. Wise, as I knew him, was the band director at Rome Free Academy, where he taught for more than 20 years. His obituary states the he later went on to become director of music and then assistant director of Rome City Schools.

Once every week when I was in fifth and sixth grade, three boys and myself would trudge downstairs to the dreary, midieval cellar of Rome’s Fort Stanwix Elementary School for drum lessons with Mr. Wise. I liked Mr. Wise and I liked my lessons. My problem was that in 1970, a lot of the kids at school believed that a girl shouldn’t play the drums. How do I know this? Because of the smart comments my classmates gave me when it was time for me to leave the room for my lessons.

“I didn’t know that a girl could play the drums!”

That was the comment that I heard the most often, usually said by boys. Since then, I’ve tried to analyze why the other kids reacted in a sexist manner to my drum lessons. Maybe because hitting an instrument wasn’t considered ladylike?

Mr. Wise was OK, though. He never gave me any flack about being a girl. He just taught me how to play the drums the same as the boys. I still remember how he taught us how to do a drum roll on our little drum pads. (No, we didn’t have real drums to play in elementary schools.) He told us to start out with a slow beat to the rhythm of “Mis-sis-sippi, Mis-sis-sippi” and gradually speed it up.

In the summer of 1970 when I was between fifth and sixth grades, the Carpenters burst onto the music scene with their Top 10 hit, “Close to You.” The first time that I saw the brother and sister duo perform the song on TV, Karen Carpenter was playing the drums. Ah ha! Another girl drummer!

Things still hadn’t gotten any better for me, though, but the time I started seventh grade at Staley Jr. High in 1971. If anything, I became discouraged with this whole drumming/sexism thing. I was scheduled in the school band with three boy drummers. The boys treated me like I was a joke, leaving me the lesser parts like bass drum or the triangle (Ding!). A stronger person might have been able to deal with it, but I had very low self-esteem in those days and didn’t stand up for myself as I probably would have today.

I dropped out of the band in the eighth grade. The following year, I started guitar lessons. Fortunately, nobody laughed at me then,

On this Mothers Day eve, I am sharing a photo of my four children just after youngest child Sean was born on Sept. 19, 2000. He was born five days after my 41st birthday.

The photo was taken the day before my son Drew’s 16th birthday. Drew, of course, is on the far left in this photo. Erin, then 6, is in the center holding Sean. Emily, then 14, is on the far right.

Looks like a nice little family, right? You wouldn’t think I would get rude remarks from people about my nice family, right? Wrong!

Evidently, there’s a lot of people out there who can’t fathom the idea that a 40-year-old woman would intentionally become pregnant. How do I know this? Because of some of the comments thrust upon me at the time.

“Was this an oops baby?” the lady cutting my hair asked me when I was pregnant.

Considering how I didn’t know this person all that well, I thought it was a rather invasive and presumptuous question. And for the record, no, he wasn’t!

Then after Sean was born, people assumed I was his grandmother! Come on, I was a youthful-looking 41 years old!

The worst, though, was when people assumed that my teenage daughter Emily was Sean’s mother. I remember one time when a salesclerk made the error and I told her Sean was MY son, not Emily’s. The lady looked totally dumbfounded in response, asking “Well, who’s this then?,” pointing at Emily. I calmly responded, “This is my daughter.. This is my son:

The sales clerk continued to look absolutely dumbfounded, as if the whole idea was totally beyond comprehension.

If I sound like I’m still somewhat irritated by all this nearly 16 years later, I have to admit, yes, I am. Emily was even more upset, though, by incidents like this.

If you see an older woman who happens to be pregnant or is caring for a newborn, please be kind. Now that I actually am a grandmother, I know would be far less insulted if someone asked me if my grandson were my son than the other way around!

As I’ve been busy most of the day writing a large-scale article for Mothers Day about the state of the modern-day mom, this photo popped into my mind. It’s definitely not modern, but its probably one of the best photos ever taken of my mother and myself together. Kudos to my Dad the photographer. It speaks volumes about the relationship I shared with my mother, who was a kind and gentle soul.

I don’t remember exactly when this was taken, but my guess it around 1962 because I look to be about 2-1/2 years old. My mother’s youth here is striking. She was probably around 26 or 27 years old here. Sad to think that I would have only have another 10 years or so with her before her untimely passing.

This Mothers Day, be sure to make your mother feel special if she still is here with you. You won’t be sorry.