When I fumbled around looking for a pair of cheater eyeglasses on the crowded coffee table so I could check out the Sunday OKC newspaper online I thought about Momma.

As a kid I remember waking up to Momma sitting at the kitchen table reading the morning newspaper, and drinking coffee.

Her coffee breath when she’d give me a good morning kiss wasn’t my favorite, but tonight I’m missing her. And the smell of coffee, which I’ve never learned to drink, even now in my octogenarian state.

Then when I looked for a pair of cheater eyeglasses on the coffee table in front of me, and glanced at a nearby table, then the stuff on the fireplace hearth I could almost hear Momma say: “Barbara Ann: Clean up that mess right this very minute!”

So I started moving this, that and another, and even trashed some papers before I got distracted. That’s when I looked in the bookcase and saw “Gone With The Wind.”

Yep, that’s a Momma thing.

The summer before I started the seventh grade Momma and I read that book together.

She’d bought it at a garage sale, and it’s dated 1938, but it was probably in 1956 or 57, when I read it out-loud. Or, sometimes she’d read, and skip over something that Rhett or Scarlett might have said, or done.

That was the last summer before Momma started working full-time, and before I turned into a teenager in 1957. That’s also when I ran home from school to watch Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand.”

After each show my best friend, Donna and I, would call each other and talk about Justine, or one of the other pretty girls who danced on the show.

Now, I have no idea how I was able to remember that dancer’s name when sometimes I can’t remember people’s names nowadays. But, that is my Welcome to Old Age for those of you who haven’t arrived there, yet.

But back to those Bandstand years, and beyond.

I had no idea just how smart Momma was until I turned 21, and my son arrived three days later.

That’s when I went straight from the hospital to her house for a few days.

That’s where I learned to bathe him in the kitchen sink, and found out putting a towel in the sink helped keep him in place.

Momma had all sorts of tricks about taking care of babies. It was her vocation.

She’d started out taking care of the newborns in the Sunday nursery at the First Baptist Church in OKC. She later started a “Mother’s Day Out” program at the church, and was director of the children’s programs there for 35 years.

When a newspaper friend and I swapped Mom stories she said that I “got my Mom’s genes.”

“Huh?” I said. “The Leadership Class you started,” she said.

“There are lots of differences between high school seniors, and little kids,” I said.

She said, “I don’t know about that.”