A year or so ago (maybe a little longer, by now), I emailed Sgt Mom, and said “Hey! Since I now have a job (or a job offer), I’m ready to make good on my promise to buy your book.”

And Mom, in her usual organized fashion, waited for my paypal to arrive, and promptly mailed out an autographed copy of her memoirs, which I, in my usual unorganized fashion, immediately put in a “safe place.”

In my vocabulary, saying something is in “a safe place” means that I’ve utterly forgotten where I stored it for safe-keeping (the current situation with 2 rebate checks -oops). So for almost a year (or a little over a year), I’ve lived my life occasionally thinking “Sure wish I knew where Sgt Mom’s book is.. I bet it would be good airplane reading.” It was probably more than “occasionally,” since everytime I open sgtstryker.com her blog-ad is right there in front of me, the first item on the page to load when I’m on a slow connection.

Last week, in the midst of a 15-minute cleaning frenzy, I sorted through a pile of old mail on the overstuffed chair in the spare bedroom, and found a padded envelope from San Antonio, still safely sealed.

I immediately transferred the magnum opus to a TRULY safe place – my travel backpack, and it has traveled with me to NJ, and is currently enroute with me to MO. I’m only about 20 pages into it as yet, since I want to give it my best attention, but I am THOROUGHLY enjoying the read.

Memoirs are a tricky business… what we think is hilarious can fall flat in the re-telling, leaving the reader or listener with that annoying sense of “guess you had to be there.” This has not been the case with Mom’s book.

Her memories slightly pre-date mine, and we’re from different parts of the country and different educational strata, parent-wise, but the similarities are there, and her memories serve as springboards for my own. Her family photos, reproduced in the book, bring memories of my own family’s photos. And her flowing text leaves me wondering if I could write my own memories as entertainingly as she writes hers.

Most importantly, and this is a huge thing for me, when reading a memoir, I find myself mentally talking to the pages as I read, as if I were having a conversation with her, instead of merely reading dry words on a page.

Well done, Mom!

I’m ever so glad I decided to buy your book, and even more glad that I’ve retrieved it from its safe place.