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My mother turned eighty-five years old on January 26. She's a small, grey-haired woman with plenty of wrinkles. When she was young, she had long brown hair and a pretty Italian face. She and my dad were a handsome couple. We used to laugh a lot together, and I can still get her laughing. Wordsworth said that the child is the father of the man. And so too the child is the mother of the woman. You never really conquer what you were. A poor girl in a poor town, with a poor mother and no father, breathing in the coal smoke, beset by worries, finds it hard to be happy as a woman. You always jump when the phone rings. Anyway, what my mother was and is helped make me, for better and worse, what I am. Here's a story I wrote. My mother has read it. I think she had mixed feelings about it. It is from my book, In and Out of the Working Class.
Michael Yates