My Mother's Favorite President

MY MOTHER GERDA NEVER CARED much for Hillary Clinton, a woman too much of her own man.  Or Barack Obama, either, a too-smart talker.

The love of her Presidential election life was Jimmy Carter, even though neither she nor my father could vote for him as non-citizens in 1976. 

Gerda liked Jimmy not just because she considered him to be humble and honest, or an especially excellent President.  She liked him because he was once a farmer who lived in Plains, Georgia, a town she visited with my father on the way to their daughter's home in Florida in the 1980s. 

The small town of several hundred people looked a little bit like Tomahawk in the Wisconsin northwoods, where my parents owned a bakery.  And it reminded her of past homes.  Of Dörrigsen, a village in Germany where they had lived after the the Second World War and ran a bakery before leaving for America with four small children in 1954.  And of Palmer, Kansas, a farming town where they made their first American home and their first lifelong American friends.

"Jimmy was a good and decent man," she used to say, and his wife, Rosalynn, was a First Lady to admire.  They were role models to whom she related.

My parents admired the Carters for their love of country and each other.  They are all blessed to have spent a long time together.  My parents celebrated 44 wedding anniversaries on earth and 23 more in our memories of them together.  Jimmy and Rosalynn mark their 70th in August.

My mother passed away in February 2013, nearly 23 years after my father died in July 1990.  It's her birthday tomorrow and I am sending her love for her 95th.  And, as she did whenever she could, a congratulatory card and a contribution to the Carter Center in Georgia.

As for our next President, I like to think my mother, and maybe even all of my four sisters, would be swayed by Jimmy's views.  He endorsed Hillary this week, even though he's been critical of her at times. I like to think that my mother would have followed his lead.