My mother would have been 103 last week. she lived to be 100 which she told me one time it was what she wanted to do. She also made a request for the funeral and forgot to put it into her will, that it should be an open casket. Because she might still have something to say. Mom was a talker. She started chatting as soon as she got up in the morning and didn't quit until she went to sleep. We knew she'd said all she had to say for the day when we could hear her snore.

She always had something to say and read all the Hollywood gossip columns she could get her hands which she promptly relayed in graphic detail all the juicy gossip to her neighbors and girlfriends. Of course those gossip columns always included such old timey stars like Clara Bow, Marlene Deitrich, Douglas Fairbanks, John Barrymore.... And then in later years she got hold of People Magazine and kept up with Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers... Mom would have been in her heyday if she'd lived a few years longer. So many stars and starlets to read about.

But when my mother read books she read all genre. She loved biographies, mysteries, romance novels, travel features. Which reminds me of her talent for writing. After a cruise with me and Charlie Rook on our old wooden cruiser one summer, I noticed she would write pages full of her version of our cruise north to Canada. I asked her to write it up like a story and I might get it published in the magazine I free lanced for at the time, Nor'westing. Editor Tom Kincaid accepted it readily and paid her the same fee he did for all writers. It was full of descriptions of the beautiful gardens British Columbia residents are famous for. It was as if she were painting a picture full of flowers. She loved to describe all the wonderful dinners we had at various Gulf Island restaurants.

One sleepless night we experienced at Westview when a fishing boat tied next to ours and had his refrigeration unit running all night was well documented and it was hilarious. She didn't think it was very funny. She was up at the crack of dawn and sitting in the cockpit just waiting for the fish boat skipper to show his face. ( To be continued).