My parents, Jerry and Lynn Crane, were born one week and five years apart (Dad, Aug.
30, 1938, and Mom, Sept. 7, 1943), both members of the “Greatest Generation.” As a family, we always celebrated their birthdays together.
This will be the fourth year Mom can no longer join us. Just passing his 88th birthday, Dad is on the mend after two years of physical challenges and recently completing the sale of their home on the Yellow River in Gwinnett County.
Betty Lynn Ready and Jerry Crane both began life from humble beginnings. Lynn Ready’s mother and father divorced when she was a toddler, not long after her Navy sailor father returned from WWII overseas. Her mother’s second marriage would end not too many years later, following the loss of Lynn’s lone sibling, a three-year-old halfbrother who succumbed to polio.
Mom was herself a polio survivor, with returning symptoms and polio syndrome also making life more painful during her final years.
Yet, young Lynn Ready often found comfort, respite, and 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, as if upon a surfboard.
Growing up in the South in a non-air-conditioned home, we were lucky to live next door to a pool at the home of my paternal grandparents, Bud and Mary Crane.
Dad’s parents would later introduce us to another family favorite in Jekyll Island. Lynn Crane loved few things more than daily morning and evening walks along the beaches of Jekyll and Driftwood Beach. When retirement beckoned for Jerry and Lynn decades later, a Jekyll vacation home was sold and traded for the white sand and Gulf Coast beaches of St. George Island and a beach house there.
And if it was possible, Mom loved the roar of the ocean waves and her beach walks there even more.
In her heart of hearts, Shirl (a family nickname for Mom), probably would have preferred a beachside retirement.
But all the kids, and soon grandchildren, were living around Metro Atlanta. Dad started looking closer than the coasts and found a lovely and huge river house overlooking rapids on the Yellow River, which forms the border to the east between DeKalb and Gwinnett counties, as well as Gwinnett and Rockdale.
Soon, Mom’s declining health made long beach drives impractical and flights almost impossible, so Dad began hunting for a lakeside home and more water to admire and bring Mom more calm.
It didn’t take long before he found a beautiful and warm manse perched high above Lake Sidney Lanier, in the affluent and well-established community of Harbour Point near Gainesville.
With the pandemic fast approaching in the spring of 2020, Mom and Dad decided to make a more permanent move to the lake house, with plans of riding out that storm.
Not long after, a few badly timed unpacking decisions by Shirl were followed by a hard fall, a broken hip, and a long ambulance ride back to her doctors at Emory in Atlanta, where hospitals were still admitting non-Covid patients.
Emergency surgery was performed on Mom’s badly broken hip.
Meantime, Dad was becoming used to a quieter life, as he seldom left Mom during the times of that long spiral.
At the river house, and while overlooking Lake Lanier, he started to really treasure mornings on the decks with his coffee and dog Chewy at his ankles or nearby.
Mom would fully transition in mid-2022, and hopefully find a better view of us all from above.
Dad decided, before suffering many of his own health reversals, to make a full move to the lake as well. Then he took his own serious fall, and followed by other surgical complications he became a Hall County resident.
He stayed at his home, and as needed, further recuperated nearby in the home of my sister, Tanya, a talented nurse practitioner.
Mom can’t join Dad for his morning coffee or birthday cakes on that deck anymore, but something tells me she can more easily see his reflection, as he gazes down and out over that shimmering lake and harbor below. And at least from the smile he is often sporting when he comes back inside, I am pretty sure he feels she is still with him or nearby, too.
Best birthday love and wishes to you both, from your number-one son.