Happy Mother's Day Bucky - a salute to my Mother. I remember my childhood very vividly mostly because of Bucky. I didn't know it then, but Bucky was different. She would let my sister Barbara and I put on iceskates and "skate" on the living room rug. She would put on a Danube Waltz record and we were Sonya Hennie skating in circles, doing dips to the music. One snowy day I was in the house sick, complaining that I was missing all the fun of playing in the snow. Bucky opened the kitchen widow (we lived upstairs over my grandmother), scooped up a bowlful of snow and put it on the kitchen table. She pulled out cookie cutters, little bowls, spoons and I got to play in the snow. I loved the Curious George book and we took it repeatedly out of the library, until the librarian told us this was the last time, other people had to have a chance to take out this book. Bucky muttered, but had a plan and she took the book home and pulled out her typewriter and copied the entire book. We didn't need to borrow the book, she would read from those pages and it was as good as the book to me. I had a small painted turtle from the circus and he was always escaping from his bowl. Bucky had a solution, and tied a piece of thread still attached to the spool to the turtle. Now, she said, all we have to do is follow the thread and we can find him anywhere he goes. Unfortunately, he went under the rug and somebody stepped on him. The turtle survived, but he had blood red eyes for quite a while. Bucky grew morning glories inside the living room windows. She put up strings and the flowers climbed the window, amazing to me. Bucky could knit and crochet. She put crochet trim around handkerchiefs, and made rag rugs, using a giant wooden crochet hook. She let me make the strips for the rug, cutting up strips from old clothes and I would sew up one side, using her pedal sewing machine. For our birthday parties, and we each had one every year, she would take tissue paper, a glass ash tray, and folded the paper in a certain way until it made a perfect candy holder, which she would fill with colored mints. When my father would bring home a "It's a boy" cigar from work, she would light it up and let us all take a puff. We would all laugh, puffing away, handing the cigar from kid to kid...there were finally six of us. But the best, the very best, were her stories. She had tragedies, comedies, histories, you name it - stories about everything. And it didn't matter if we heard it before, in fact it enhanced it...we knew what was coming. Bucky had six kids but she knew how to treat herself good, with reading, with playing solitaire in the morning until she won a game, with sunning in the back yard. She was dramatic, Daddy would call her Sarah Bernhardt, and shocking...at Christmas she would put on her bathing suit and sit in front of the Christmas tree and Daddy would grab his camera and get a picture of this. Even her name, all my friends call their mothers, Mommy, Mom or Ma, I was the only one who had a different name for my mother. God Bless you Bucky, I love you with all my heart , this Mother's Day more than ever.