Wathada's 23rd birthday

My mother used to sing while she was doing any kind of housework. She had a really nice voice and she knew just about every song in the world. When I was three or four years old she taught me to sing a ‘round.’ (A round is where two people sing the same song, starting at different times, so the melody creates harmony for itself.) The song she taught me was Catch a Falling Star. I think it was recorded by Perry Como, a popular singer at the time. Everyone on my mom’s side of the family sang all the time. Any time any of us got together we usually ended up singing before it was all over. 

We took a lot of pictures in our family. That may be because my great-grandfather was a professional photographer. One of the things we would do for fun pretty often was to sit down with a box full of pictures (sometimes a photo album, but more often a box) and look at them, to make sure they had the subject matter written on the back of them, and just to enjoy looking at them and talking about them. One of my favorite photographs from my childhood is my mother and me sitting on the couch going through the picture box. I was 4 years old. 

My mom was just 18 when I was born, and she says she doesn’t remember a time when she didn’t have me. As for me, I’m pretty sure I thought she and I were the same age.

PHOTO: Dad looking through the picture box

These pictures were taken on my mother's 23d birthday. My uncle Ron took the pictures.

PHOTO: Ron Burford, age 15