Last week, my childhood friend Carey’s  mother passed away. This was the second close friend in a little over a year who lost a mother.

His mother Shirley was very creative. She ran a ceramics studio (which is how our parents met), she painted (watercolor and acrylic), sewed, crocheted, did needlepoint, made clothing, and was a terrific cook.

During junior and senior high school I practically lived over at their house in the summer, eating three meals a day there for several day stretches. She always used to say, “I need to put some weight on you. Fatten you up.” It eventually worked, but that was a few years later 😉

Even though I rant a lot about how bad wrestling storylines can be, one thing that I’ve always liked about wrestling was being able to tell a story within a wrestling match (or across a series if you were lucky). A match should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. As a rookie, you sometimes started in the middle, or you ended in the middle. Over time you figured out how to get the crowd involved and let them influence the sequence of events, building up to a finish that they would react to. They might end up happy or angry, but they reacted if you did it right.

I’d like to think that some part of me was influenced by the creative people in my life, and Shirley was one of them.

We will miss you.