The first thing to notice about my mother is that she spells her last name with two m's, whereas my father, whose name it really is, spells it with only one m.  Nothing earth-shaking, but a show of defiance and maybe a harbinger of things to come. My father tolerated it. So can I. Another anomaly:  when it came time to christen my younger sister, whom we all called Gladys-Ann ( a namesake after my mother's older sister, Aunt Gladys ),  my father, who stood in for my mother while she was recuperating,  decided to call her Alice ( after his mother).  And so it was. As a child she was Gladys (as my mother wished).  As a married woman, she is Alice (as my father, and her husband wished), and it is her legal name.

My mother was a Ryan from County Cork in southern Ireland.  Her family were railroad people.  She never met nor knew my father in Ireland.  It took the New York melting pot to blend the north and south of Ireland.

My mother grew up not far from Blarney Castle in Cork city.  To be sure, she hung upside down by her ankles and "kissed the Blarney stone". "Rebel Cork" is what her city was known as during the "Troubles" with England in the fight for Irish independence.  One of  her kinsman,  Michael  Collins  (her grandmother was a Collins) was instrumental in bringing a formal cease fire to the troubled land, just before my mother emigratd to America in 1922.  When Michael Collins returned from his cease fire agreement in London,  his kinsmen in Cork shot and killed him because they didn't like the deal he made with Winston Churchill by surrendering to England the six counties in the north, my father's  birthplace.

 The "troubles"  still continue to this day.  People are still being shot and killed over the celebration of the "Battle of the Boyne" which occurred 500 years ago.  Who really gives a damn ?  They do.

 But, my mother survived it and came across the pond (the Atlantic Ocean) on a Bitish passenger ship to the Ellis Island quarantine station in New York harbor. And lucky it is that she made the voyage, since she surely would  not have survived as a teenage gun runner.

Three of  my mother's sisters soon joined her:  my Aunts Gladys,  Angie and Queenie.  Queenie married my father's brother Dan and had one son, my double first cousin, Danny.  There were lots of other first cousins on my father's side (most of whom I never really got to know), but only one on my mother's side.  I do, however, remember the children of my father's sister Annie.  Ralphy, Charley and Jimmie came to live with us for a short time when their mother, my father's younger sister, died unexpectedly on Christmas Eve in 1934.

My mother had five children, including me, the oldest and perhaps, the most troublesome, although I didn't see it that way at the time.  After two years of isolation in a monastic seminary, preparing for ordination into a religious missionary order, I ran off to sea,  trying to catch the tail end of the war.  I missed it.  I got to China one month after the A bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  I spent seven months in Shanghai,  playing chess with White Russian emigrees.

Finally I started home, after getting my ( Black Death ) plague shot  on the day I left.   When I got to Manila in the Phillipines,  I called my mother.  She was sure glad to hear from me and find out that I was still alive after a year of worrying. I reassured her  that I was O.K. and would return home soon, probably before the end of the year.  The 3 minute telephone call from Manila to New York via the trans-Pacific cable cost me $42 ( almost a week's wages at that time, when the minimum wage in the U.S. was 40 cents/ hour ).

I arrived home the following year and promptly took off again to England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.  Then down to Maracaibo and the Netherland West Indies.  And then back to high school,  from which  I finally graduated in 1948 at age 20 with an asterisk behind my name for being in the top 10%.  It made my mother proud.  I also won an Admiral Holloway scholarship to Harvard and Yale and Princeton and 49 other top rated schools..

But, I wasn't ready yet for a steady classroom diet and so I took off ,again.  This time it was the U.S. Air Force.  I entered flight school without a diploma by taking and passing a college equivalency exam.  It wasn't really equivalent, but I went anyway.  After 7 months in the peacetime, low budget, low morale Air Force  and after crashing an AT-6 into a dry arroya of the Red River down in Texarkana land (between Texas and Arkansas), I took off with a bunch of squadron buddies to prospect for uranium down in Brazil.  We never made it.  I lost the team's money in a wild poker game in Houston and so I headed to Alaska ( by foot).  Starving in Arizona, I got a job with Western Electric installing telephone central office equipment in Phoenix.  After a couple of months, saving my money and with a little help from home, I  returned to New York,  where I applied to enter the federal U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at King's Point as a Cadet-Midshipman.

Four years later, I graduated as Ensign, U.S.N.R. and 3rd Engineer, unlimited horse power, steam and diesel, any ocean, any tonnage, any time, any where. And so I went back to sea as an Officer, this time.  After a few short trips down to Central America and Ecuador,  I came back to New York and married the girl I had met during the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, two years before.  Over the next ten years we had four children,  each  born in a different State of the Union.  Whether it was due to excessive travel,  lack of communication,  inattention,  animal spirits,  inability to adjust expectations,  or changes of the moon--we got divorced in 1968.

Before the break-up of my first marriage, however, I was a traveling Aerospace Engineer.  I was continuously traveling because we were not allowed to use telephones to discuss our business.  Our work was too secret and the phone syrtems were not secure.  I also went to school continuously, while working in the aerospace industry ( 15 universities in all).  Our research was on the front line and therefore it was necessary and desirable to maintain academic contacts,  both for course content and liaisons wiyh the faculty for consulting purposes.  While I was a doctoral candidate at the University of  Michigan,  I financed my Advisor and his  wife to a nice winter vacation  in Mexico City as a part of our consulting arrangement.  We all benefitted and profitted from such arrangements and the programs we were working on,  did too.

And so, I progressed from jet engine designer to rocket designer to space capsule designer to moon capsule designer to nuclear weapon designer.  And then the bottom fell out of the Aerospace industry and so I went back to school again.  This time,  I went to the social sciences to try to make some sense out of the mad cap world I lived in.  I had just spent about 10 years being a MAD design engineer.  Literally, I was a MAD designer.  MAD stood for mutual assured destructionI and it was the doctrine upon which all our lives were based ( me and my family and at least half of the rest of the people in the world ).

I am still in school ( the University of Mississippi ) but  my state of mind is now more akin to that of an uncommitted uninvolved observor.  I like school  and being a student.  It is recreation for me.  I guess you could say it is my hobby.  So far,  I  have earned four degrees and several certificates and participated in 4 PHD programs.  In at least 2,  I have an ABD  ( all but dissertation ),  which is really  no degree at all.  It is just a talking point that some people use to gloss over the fact that they didn't  finish the program.  I never did either.  And so, I never got the big prize. But one of my sons did.  And one of my daughters did.  So,  there is always hope for the next generation.

While I'm gettig older, my mom is getting older.  She's 97 now and living up in the woods in Maine.  I'm 72 and living down in the land of cotton (Mississippi).  And good times are not forgotten.
 

Mom passed on August 7, 2002.  She would have been 100 on December 10, 2002.  She had a good life.  The world feels a little emptier without her.  I miss her.  I'll write more later.