Bob CollinsI’m up in Massachusetts for a few days, visiting my 94-year-old mother in my hometown.
Today’s schedule calls for me to take her to the bank. “They have free pens there,” she says. So we’ll go get a pen — I’m betting we grab two — if I can figure out how to get her up into the giant truck, my twin brother let me borrow for the time I’m here. Mom raised one good son, anyway.
She doesn’t get around well anymore, and she knows it. “Don’t ever get old,” she advised as she struggled with some task we take for granted. It’s the same quote her mother told me years ago.
So I made sure I had the volume down low, even though my mother is deaf, and the computer screen turned away when I watched Boyd Huppert’s outstanding piece last night on Sandy Abeler, 89, of Bertrum, Minn., who swam across Cedar Lake there the other day.
“Nobody told her that she couldn’t be 89 and swim across the lake,” her daughter told KARE 11.
She made the swim, as she has before, to raise money to send kids to Camp Lebanon, a Christian camp and retreat.
It took her about a half hour to make the journey.
She missed out on some sweet free pens, though.
