Thread by @tommyxtopher

Visiting my mom in the hospital for possibly the last time today. I happened to pick this shirt, and then I remembered it's the exact same color as the cushion she handmade me for my sousaphone (yep, I played that).

https://twitter.com/tommyxtopher/status/1403030531638497287

Lots of reminders of Mom today. Passed an AccessLink van on the Parkway, that's how she would come to see us sometimes. Passed a Stewart's. That was our special place when I was little. She...

... Mom used to tell me about going to "Stortz Root Beer" is what I thought she was saying, with her grandfather. And one time, we were out running errands and she said "Let's go to Stortz."

I was probably 4 or 5 and I told her I didn't like the taste of beer. She laughed and...

... told me it wasn't the same, but I was still skeptical. "You can get a hamburger, and something else to drink!" she said. I was in.

I tried the root beer and loved it, and that hamburger was the best hamburger I'd ever eaten. And when we got there I was like "OHH, STEWART'S!"

My daughter is not a fan of religion, and she keeps remarking about how religious this hospital is, and when I told my adult kids Justin and Chris that I read John 14 to mom from my phone, she went "You have to read the bible when you're in there??!?" 😂

The big kids were saying how they'd left the bible in the car so I can see where she got that idea.

None of us kids are religious but mom is, which is very comforting right now.

There's a song she used to play on the piano all the time, this jubilant little concerto that she'd practice with, and damn it if she didn't tell me the name of it a hundred times, but I can't remember it. But I can still hear it clear as a bell.

My mom taught piano and guitar, and tried her hand as a folk singer in the late 60s. She was pals with Nick Jagger's cousin Ellen, and staved off a Jaggernaut or two in her time lol.

In the early 70s she volunteered at a crisis hotline, so we'd have a babysitter some nights. So when the song "Hotline" came out, I thought it was about my mom's volunteer job 😂

She went to college at Seton Hall and Union college, and she used to bring me with her sometimes, I must've been 3 or 4 but I still remember the way she'd show me off to her friends. One of them showed me part of a frog they were dissecting, I can still see it.

Another time she took me to a theater in the round play that one of her friends was in, and they brought me under the stage after. One of the characters was the Sun. I think that's the first time I thought I'd like to be an actor.

My oldest son just observed that "Most of the Psalms are about, like, 'I have haterz. '" 😂

My mom was adopted. When I was about 13 I found her OG birth certificate. Her baby name was Janice Faye. Now it's Susan Leslie.

I went through a decades-long phase of being a smartass about religion but my mom turned me around, at least about being a smartass. She was like a bible Wikipedia, and could think up a passage to apply to any situation. For years we talked about getting her to write a...

Current events bible column on the regular, she did a few practice blogs but never got the hang of the tech. She took the right thing from the bible: the wisdom.

But I mean, I'd read her, like, a random headline about Rod Blagojevich and she'd bust out a bible verse on it.

I think she turned to religion around the time I was introduced to it, probably 1973 or so. It very much defines her, along with her love of music and cooking.

For now, let me leave you with this memory: my mom being interviewed by a Japanese news show after I mentioned her at a White House briefing, and zinging @JayCarney #SusanBomb

This is mom and me being hat twins 😂

This is what I wrote for my mom on Facebook.
facebook.com/tommy.christop…