The young Japanese girl was living in my sister Terese’s home in the beautiful Partry Mountains in the west of Ireland. She had been sent there to learn English, although the notion of sending the Japanese to Ireland to learn English always struck me as kind of curious. The Irish have put their own twist on the language centuries ago and it’s not mainstream Oxford English or American English, but its own wonderful concoction of unique phrases, words turned upside down, and meanings that are very different to the Irish than they might be to the rest of the English speaking world. Case in point: my mother (she spent several months each year visiting her daughters and grandkids in Ireland) often used the word “fanny” as in “Child, you better start behaving or I’ll paddle your fanny.” However, “fanny” in Ireland translates into the word “vagina”; my nieces had to work up the courage to tell their grandmother that she was talking like a porn star. Another example: my Irish brother-in-law Jim refers to a nursing home as a “home for the bewildered.”  Try that one stateside.

My sister had taken in several Japanese students over the years, allowing them to pick up some of the local culture along with their adopted tongue. This particular girl, perhaps because she was terrified to be in a new country by herself, or overwhelmed by the activity levels in a house filled with six kids, or just being simply a timid soul, had barely uttered a word since her arrival. My mother, Rita Wogan, among the most verbal of people, set out to remedy that situation. She began to query the timid girl, trying to pry out of her a name, which she did, and her age, which she also got. My mother pressed on, asking here what part of Japan she was from. The girl shyly blurted out that she was from Osaka, Japan’s second largest city. Delighted that they finally had something in common, my mother exclaimed, “Osaka, why my first husband bombed Osaka!” Which in point of fact was true back in 1945, but I have tried without success for many years to think up a comeback for that line.

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My mother gave my wife and me the gift of her time when we were both just starting to travel a bit. We would take four day jaunts to various cities once a year or so and she would stay with the kids. They loved her visits, which were filled with stories, lots of baked goods and some pretty goods meals. The meals, just like our lunches at home on a school day, were often accompanied by lectures. Topics varied from the depression, the war, the holocaust (her personal favorite), to issues of morality. On one such visit, my two daughters, then in their teen years, got an earful of her views on the problems with modern relationships. The problem, she stated was the “C” word, of which there was not enough of, apparently.

My daughters were understandably confused, so Eileen ventured a guess as to what she meant by the “C” word. She guessed “condoms”. My mother was horrified and sputtered “Commitment! Commitment!” “How did you girls ever hear about condoms?”

Mom had just learned what the prosecuting lawyers in the O.J. trial had learned the hard way. Don’t ask any question to which you don’t already know the answer.

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My friend Christine Clancy once confided that when she first met me, she thought that there were twenty or more children in my family. A logical mistake, given Rita Wogan’s penchant for giving most of the kids in the Wogan family a nonsense name, or two names, or three. I won’t embarrass them by repeating them here; they have had to suffer with those names all their lives. We often still call each other by those names.

But Minnie, Poodie, Tassi, Soona, the late Binky, and Finn-man, you know who you are. As Herman Melville said in the last line of Moby Dick, “I alone escaped to tell thee.” Oh, and my sister Maureen escaped without a nonsense name, too.

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Put the word “teat” in front of twelve year boy and you’re off to the races. During another of my mother’s kid-watching visits while we travelled, she told the kids how she helped a lamb on one of my sisters’ farms in Ireland. Lambs tended to come into the world all around the same time, I guess, and mom loved “lambing season.” One of the adult lambs had a cracked and sore nipple, so she told the kids how she saved the day with her Mary Kaye moisturizer. She sold Mary Kaye products for years, and she honestly believed they had a product that would solve any problem from acne to insomnia.

What she told the kids, with my then 12 year old son in attendance, was that she restored the lamb’s ailing spigot by applying Mary Kaye’s cream to the lamb’s teat. My son lost it in a fit of laughter, which is about what any 12 year old boy would do. My mother, somewhat indignantly, asked him, “Well, what you have me call it?” He lost it all the more.

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She once enlisted the aid of my Uncle Jimmy and some poor nun in stealing a plaque from the chapel in the old Resurrection parish. The bronze plaque, which hung at the back of the Memorial Chapel in the basement of the “Old School”, contained the names of parishioners lost in WW II. Her first husband’s name was on that grim, heroic list. When she heard that the school building was about to be razed, she made a visit to the chapel. Resurrection Parish in that year was (and still is) a lot like a war zone, but that didn’t stop her. She brought her brother Jimmy, a retired copper, for firepower.

She located the plaque, now gathering dust on the floor, and asked the pastor if she might have it. He declined, probably thinking she was a bit off to be hanging about in this neighborhood to begin with. So naturally, she enlisted some poor nun who was formerly at the school and the three of them returned and walked in and calmly loaded the plaque into Jimmy’s massive Mercury Marquis trunk. Mercury Marquis, by the way, are the preferred weapons of choice for senior drivers.

She needed to find it a new home, and learned of a Chicago Firefighters museum that was being planned. So her logic went like this: Resurrection was the parish whose pastor was also the Fire Dept. Chaplain, Msgr. William Gorman. My dad was one of his drivers. So therefore, the Firefighters Museum would want this plaque. When I explained to her that the names on the plaque included dead soldiers and not dead fireman, she was unmoved. The firefighter museum guys were equally confused by this circular logic.

She eventually gave it to the Irish American Heritage Center where it supposedly sits with the other archives from a long ago West Side. She could be stubborn.

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My siblings and their children each have their “Mom” or “Grandma”stories, which we share every time we’re together. She remains a happy point of light in all of our lives, especially looking back. Her many kindnesses, her ability to drive you nuts with her projects, her admonitions to “get over your pity party” to complainers and those feeling sorry for themselves, and her joyous approach to life has marked us all. We all miss our moms, I guess, but they have a way of living on in their stories and those stories take some of the sadness away from their departure. She still makes us smile.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the Moms.