Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Four Years Blogging

Pauline and Monique, age 2, 1981

As is my tradition, I pay tribute to my late Mom and mark the anniversary of my blog.  As is also my tradition, I am tardy with it.  By at least two weeks!

Before I explain the picture, I want to give my belated welcome to Keep It Klassy, Salem, a relatively new blog that has been around for several years.  I don’t agree with the blogger on many things but I am delighted that someone is following Salem politics after the demise of the old Salem Politics blog.  His blog is in my blogroll now, as is the new Salem Patch, which has flashes of excellence and could be the future of news media on the North Shore, at least if AOL lets it.

Now, the picture.  As I’ve said on numerous occasions, I came from a foster home, and Jeannette Moisan was my foster mom and for all purposes my defacto Mom.  On the left is Pauline, Jeannette’s biological daughter.  If we were related by blood we would be brother and sister.  But she wasn’t my foster sister;  we had many girl foster children but none of them was ever, or ever could be, a “sister”.  So Pauline was also my defacto sister.

The cute little toddler with her is Monique.  Mom looked after many kids like her, but she was one of the sweetest.  She would turn on the charm and be manipulative as only a toddler could.  We had a dozen Monique stories, such as when she learned to say my sister’s name—and then kept her up all night saying “PAU-LYLINE!”  Or the time Pauline was in a fruit stand in Peabody and Monique yelled “DA-DA” (her name for me.)  Pauline tells her, “Da-da’s not here!”  Unknown to her I had, for whatever reason, walked down from Varney St. to find Pauline and walk into that same fruit stand…

What a sweet kid she was.  It was hard to see her go back to her Mom.  I hope she’s doing well today.

One last picture with Jeannette:

Monique and Jeannette eating Fudge 1981

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