Yvonne Patricia Wisemiller

• 1 bottle Sierra Nevada Pale Ale - home
• 1 bottle Belgium Ale - home
• 1 pint Scotch Ale - Elliott Bay Brewery

My mom loved to talk. A lot. She would get on a roll and never shut up! (some might say I take after her) It would get to the point where Michelle, Ken, and I would tune her out and add our "Yes"es, "Oh"s, and "Ummm, I can't remember."s whenever there was a pause in the "conversation." Sometimes she would catch on and she'd say "You're not listening are you?" in a somewhat irritated way, and then she'd get really quiet.

One story I love sharing with Ken and Michelle is the time that mom and I road-tripped to Yosemite National Park to do some camping. She had "just wanted to get out of the house", and thought it would be nice to do some hiking and sight seeing in Yosemite for a few days. I was in my early 20's, so I was past the age where being with your mother was an embarrassment, (for the most part), and we hadn't been to Yosemite in a long time, so it seemed like a perfect getaway. We drove the six hours up to her sister's house in Oakdale, CA (where the other Hershey's plant is located!), stayed overnight and then drove the few hours into Yosemite the next morning. Mom pretty much talked the entire time! I had planned to do some reading on the drive and had a book open and ready in my lap, but whenever I would begin to read it, she would start talking! I would listen intently and wait for her to take a break and after a few minutes of silence, I would think it was safe for me to try again, but no! As soon as I brought the book up and read a few sentences, she would start talking again! I really think she was doing this on purpose! It was like this for most of the drive into Yosemite - silence, "read", talk....silence, "read", talk...silence, "read", talk.

Talking was one of my mom's most memorable qualities; but driving was her most infamous. (Her brother-in-law even reminisced of her "speeding up and down the dusty back roads of fruit orchards as a teenager" at her funeral.) Driving up the twisty two-lane mountain roads to Yosemite, mom was tailgating a tour bus with the anger usually reserved for hornets. "WHY DOESN'T THIS BUS GO ANY FASTER!" "WHY DOESN'T IT PULL OVER!?" "CAN'T IT SEE THAT I'M RIGHT BEHIND IT!" These were blasted in between her bits of conversation directed toward interrupting my reading. At one point I got frustrated and said, "Why don't you just slow down? You're not going to pass and it's going the speed limit anyway." And she spurted, "I CAN'T slow down….this car doesn't GO any slower! If I don’t keep the pedal at this position the car will STOP!" She had a way of saying the most ridiculous and unbelievable things. I can't even remember if we ever got past that bus.

The way she talked was also comedy. She went through a stage where she over-enunciated every letter, especially 't's and 's's. She would say "fajitas" as "fa-hee-TAZ". Ken, Michelle, and I mimicked her by creating this phrase: "I have eaten (ea-TEN) fajitas (fa-hee-TAZ) in Santa Ana." (SAN-TAH Ana.) While she was busy over-enunciating some letters, she was busy dropping others altogether, such as the "g" from most verbs. "C'mon, let's get movin'!" or "Look at those guys over there...they're cruisin'. Yep, that's what they're doin'; cruisin'." or "Why are they ridin' in the middle of the street? They shouldn't be ridin' in the middle; this is HUN-TING-Ton!"

My mom had many ridiculous and unbelievable quotes, but some of my favorites are:

• When Michelle - California-tanned, blonde, and runner-thin - failed to get a loading-dock worker's attention when the three of us pulled up to the dock, mom sent her back telling her, "GET UP THERE AND SHOW SOME LEG!!"
  

• The time she let Ken, Michelle, and I know that since she'd gotten braces, Jim was a little nervous in, uh, bed.

• The perfect example of how two of her qualities crossed paths: We were driving back from LA one night and she's in the carpool lane cruisin' at about 80 mph and she's tailgatin' the car in front of us like it's Mark Harmon (one of her faves) and says seriously, "Yeah, I have nightblindness.....I can't see very well at night. Everything's real fuzzy..…..I don't need glasses, you know; because it's a night thing……I can see fine during the day, but.…....like right now, I can't see very well……I'm nightblind…..it's just real hard to see at night." and this goes on for about fifteen minutes; she's still doin' 80, she's still tailgatin'. I'm pushed as far back into my seat as I can go - foot stomped into the floor trying to hit that imaginary brake hoping we don't die.

The quality I admire most in my mom, however (other than her absolute love of all things chocolate), is her independence. It was she that drove alone through Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio in search of a graduate school that she could attend to get her teaching degree. She had always wanted to be a teacher. It was she that initiated the divorce and took two of her children and moved to Columbus, Ohio; a place she'd only been once. It was she that flew alone to Italy for her first time in Europe to meet a friend, only to miss her connection in New York and have to catch the next flight; all her luggage was lost and she had to borrow and buy clothes in Italy for a six-week trip. It was she that loaded up Ken and Michelle in March of one year to drive a barely-running Volvo station wagon from Columbus to Atlanta to visit me over spring break, only to have to turn around in Cincinnati because of snow. It was she that wanted to drive the U-Haul from Orange County to Tacoma when I moved here in 1994. I followed in my Tercel.

And it was she that suggested the trip to Yosemite. We had been to Yosemite several times and she had been many times as a child, but this was the first time it was just the two of us. We decided to day-hike one of the trails that would take us to one of the falls. We hiked together most of the way and when we reached the falls, I decided to continue on to the top of Half-Dome and she decided to go in a different direction towards another falls. Later that night after finding each other back at camp, she told me that she had met another solo woman hiker on the way and they had reached the falls; higher than she'd ever climbed and a falls she'd always wanted to see.

I still remember the joy she had in her voice when she told me.

Happy Mother's Day, mom.