Word: mother
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Slater Barron: born East Orange, N.J., 1930; graduated Susquehanna University, 1951, degree in sociology; 1951-53, child-welfare work; 1953-55, U.S. Navy officer; 1955, marriage to U.S. Marine; 1963, art course for military wives while stationed in France; 1963-74, moving, moving, moving, mother of four children, trying to paint and cook and sew and clean house until one day, as she was working in oils, the buzzer went off on the dryer and a light bulb went on in her head. Lint...
...instances are haunting. Stand back, and there is a vibrant wedding party, the artist in the middle as a young flower girl; look close, and there is a jungle of fibers that came from the cuffs on your least favorite trousers. She has done four studies of her aged mother, who has been ravaged by Alzheimer's disease. In one there is a woman toddling along in a jogging suit, and in another there is a bent-down crone who has lost her mind...
...together such a thing, she pastes lint to the furnishings in the room and the wire figures that represent her mother and late father. The worst part of it -- "drudge work," Barron says -- is the floors and walls. A project this size usually exhausts her lint supply...
...time that was nearly over, these years, seemed as close to family as most of us would ever get"). Lovers are always too distant in these tales, and families usually too close. Generations are in every sense confused. One story finds a teenage girl drawn to one of her mother's high school friends; another has a restless middle-age woman mothered by her house-loving daughter. Sadder even than the abundance of casual pregnancies is the absence of parental models. Too old for her age, and too young, one high school girl reads Ingenue, Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle and the Bible...
...Another Mother's Day down, the awkward ceremony survived. Loaded like a German fruitcake, you smiled wide as a freeway, wobbled under tulips, chocolates, a witty card, wished her all the happiness in the world and told all the old stories. Wasn't it fun? Wasn't she pleased, the ancient matriarch who, in a time so distant that it seems made up, slid you out soaked, milky, blind into the sheets? On her designated "day," that same panting, sweating girl sat dry as a museum bone, a china plate receiving alms...