Here's To You, Mr. President

Throughout her life my mother had only one President. Whenever she spoke of The President she absolutely was not referring to whatever man was currently sitting in the Oval Office. Franklin D. Roosevelt died months before my mother celebrated her twenty-seventh birthday. She'd seen him once when trains still carried people and presidents throughout the country. His train made a whistle stop in her small town of Wickenburg, Arizona. Doubtless just about everyone who lived in Wickenburg and its surrounding hills and deserts gathered at the Santa Fe Depot that day. My mother remembered in vivid detail The President standing on the platform at the back of the train -- at the back of his car.
"He waved to us. And he smiled."
Surely a man waving to a crowd and smiling could not have engendered such a life long loyalty. Perhaps it wasn't his waving to the crowd, after all. Maybe it was what he did for the whole country and -- as my mother felt -- for her and her family in particular. You see, my mother knew the Great Depression first hand. When my mother was fourteen years old -- in 1932 -- my grandfather died after a long illness. My mother was the youngest of seven children. She summed up that period as going abruptly from being poor to having nothing at all. She learned a lot of ways of cooking eggplant so that it looked almost but not quite like meat. She never lost the knack of always managing to cook up something out of nothing. She never forgot what it was like to lose everything. And she never forgot what her President did for her family and serendipitously for the rest of the country.
Here's what I'm thinking now. If my mother were alive, she might be on the verge of considering the possibility that this country is about to inaugurate another President.
I think she'd like that.