Mom story

Seeing as it's almost Mother's Day, and since I have a wonderful mother with a great sense of humor who will never see this blog anyway, and since I could never even begin to tell you how great she is and how much I love her, think I will instead share funny stories and pictures.

This first story Dad told us at dinner Saturday night. (Mom and Dad and Sue and I met at Applebee's because I can ride there on my wheel chair. My sore tooth put a damper on the evening.). Anyway, Mom made some kind of slight mistake and said, "Well, I'll be John Brown!"

We laughed, and Dad told this story about how when he and Mom were still newly-weds. They were in Boston at a picnic for newly graduated preachers. Mom was all dressed up and went through the serving line and her plate was completely loaded down, and she tripped and fell flat on the ground and her food flew everywhere. She looked up at all these startled people in the food line and said, "Well, I'll be John Brown!", a Southern expression I'm sure they'd never heard before.

Wonder where that exclamation comes from? As a rebellious abolitionist, John Brown was greatly hated in the deep South. They say that it was his raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 that escalated tensions that, a year later, led to secession and the Civil War. Maybe saying "Well I'll be John Brown!" was like saying. 'Well, I'll be the devil."

When we were kids and lived in Winchester, Harpers Ferry was just a nice Sunday afternoon drive away, so we went there all the time. The main memory I have of these educational trips is that Harpers Ferrry had a wax museum, and in it they had a wax depiction of the raid. In that display, they had a diorama of the raid that had a wax "John Brown" laying on the ground wounded, AND HE BREATHED! It was super creepy for kids!