by Valerie MacEwan
*seems only fitting to have the Mule editor be part of the homecoming, right ya’ll?

Quick Momma story:

I asked her how she met Daddy. See, the doctors tell me the more she thinks about the past, the more it works her brain. So I bring up Cincinnati, Ohio in the 1930s, ask all kinds of questions about when she was in college.

“What was your first date like?” I ask.

She laughs. After a detailed bit of background explaining how she and Bob ended up at a Christmas fraternity party, she tells me how she was too vain to wear her glasses to the party. This is 1932, she’s a 16-year-old University of Cincinnati freshman studying engineering. Daddy was 18 and at the time, enrolled in pre-med studies.

“Somehow, people began throwing things. I didn’t wear my glasses, because I’d been teased in school by boys saying girls in glasses never get passes and silly me, at 16 and in college, I still believed it. I got hit in the face with a tomato. This sounds kind of odd now, but I remember how kind your father was, how gently he wiped all that mess off my face and how tenderly he cleaned up my hair and… that is a funny story… really funny. Up until now, it seemed romantic. Now it sounds really funny. The tomato part was not important to me, it was Bob, about Bob carefully fixing my hair… so romantic.”

I can’t get my mind past my mother getting hit in the face with a tomato. Or her being at a frat party in 1932.

What kind of Christmas memories do your parents tell?