My parents, Jerry and Lynn Crane were born one week and five years apart (Dad on August 30, 1938, and Mom on September 7, 1943), both members of the “Greatest Generation.” As a family, we always celebrated their birthdays together. This will be the third year Mom can no longer join us. Approaching his 86th birthday, Dad is wrapping up perhaps the most challenging year of his long life.
Betty Lynn Ready and Jerry Crane both began life from humble beginnings. Lynn Ready’s mother and father divorced when she was only a toddler, not long after her Navy Sailor father returned from overseas and WWII. Her mother’s second marriage would end not too many years later, following the loss of Lynn’s only sibling, a half-brother, who succumbed to polio at the age of 3. Mom is herself a polio survivor and returning symptoms and polio syndrome also made life more painful during her final years.
Young Lynn Ready would often find comfort, respite and I think some degree of escape and calm in large bodies of water. Long a strong swimmer, she would years later swim the backstroke with my brother or I as toddlers standing atop her abdomen. Growing up in the south in a non-air-conditioned home, we were lucky to live next door to a pool (and the home of my paternal grandparents, Bud and Mary Crane)…