In my mother's bedroom, there is a picture on the wall. It's a picture I remember first seeing on her bedroom wall when I was a child. It's a picture of a young woman wearing a nurse's cap, a white uniform and a blue cape draped over her shoulders. The woman is holding a newly printed diploma and her face glows with pride.

In my mother's closet today, there are three carefully ironed uniforms. Below them, are two pair of neatly polished, white shoes. The cape hangs at the end of the closet and her always starched cap is on the shelf above.

My mother was born deep in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee. She was born to a coal miner father and a woman who was the only thing a woman of that time and place could be, a wife and mother.

Poor doesn't even begin to describe the condition of the people in those hills in those days. In the best of times, families lived in company shanties and used their company scrip to buy food at the company store.

Each day, the men went down into the mines with candles flickering atop their hard hats and at least one man carrying a caged bird. The bird was to warn the men if there turned out to be too much gas down in the mine. My grandfather usually worked twelve hour shifts down in those mines. He swung a pick, used a shovel and pushed carts filled with coal. This is how he earned his living and fed his family when times were good.

When a mining community closed, some men were hired to move on to the next community. Those who weren't, sometimes stayed behind and tried to scratch out a living by crawling into abandoned mine shafts and filling sacks with coal they chipped away from the walls by hand. Many of them, including my grandfather, lived in tarpaper shacks they built with their own hands. These were some of the most fiercely independent men this world has ever known. They bowed their heads to no one and would rather die than accept charity.

My mother was born into such a family. Most of my mother's friends dropped out of school long before they reached the tenth grade. The boys went to work in the mines and the girls married those boys. Often both the boy and the girl were still children themselves. My mother took a different path.

When my mother finished the tenth grade, the highest grade of schooling there was back in those hills, she left home. My mother followed a dream she'd had since early childhood. She wanted to be a nurse.

In a land where both darkness, ignorance and poverty reigned, my mother desperately wanted knowledge and cleanliness. To accomplish this, she signed on with a hospital offering a diploma to any young woman willing to serve the hospital as a student nurse for three years without pay. In effect, my mother indentured herself to that hospital as barely more than a servant girl to fulfill her dream.

For three years, my mother tended to patients. She changed their soiled dressings, fed them their meals, bathed them, gave them what medicines were available, assisted with surgeries and with childbirths and wept with families when her patients died. In return for working these eight hour shifts, she was given a bed to sleep in and food to eat. Most importantly, she was allowed to spend yet another four hours a day in class, learning Chemistry, Anatomy, Microbiology and even College Algebra and English.

When my mother walked across that stage to receive her diploma, she had earned something not one young woman in ten thousand had in those days and in that place. She was a Registered Nurse and had literally fought her way out of the squalor and ignorance that surrounded her.

My mother still has pictures of her on horseback, working as a public health nurse in those hills. Often, she was the closest thing to a doctor those people had. She delivered babies, gave lectures to families barely able to read and...just as she had learned to do in the hospital where she was taught, she wept with families when one of them died.

My mother went on to work in a hospital where she met and married my father during his internship there. My father had problems with alcohol that plagued him all the days of his life. These problems resulted in his moving from one town to another all during my childhood. For a period of time, perhaps two years or so, he might be the most highly paid and respected man in town. This would be followed by a period of a year or so while he sought work in another town or state. During these periods, my mother supported our family as a nurse.

Shortly after my mother's seventieth birthday, she did something she had to do to maintain her license as a Registered Nurse. She went to a firehouse near her home and took a renewal course in CPR. At seventy years of age, she got down on her hands and knees and did what the twenty year old girls in the class were doing. She blew air into the mouths of plastic dummies and demonstrated that she still had the skill to press on someone's chest and keep their heart beating.

Her lips might have been bruised and she could barely walk when she arrived home, but her pride as she showed us her CPR certificate brought tears to my eyes.

Am I proud of my mother? What do you think? My mother never nagged me, but she did repeat one thing over and over as I grew to manhood. "Stand tall, son, stand proud" she would say. "Never stop trying to improve yourself and never......ever.......give up on anything in this life."

Those are my thoughts as I look at the picture on my mother's bedroom wall. Those are my thoughts as I hug her frail frame and kiss her forehead during my visits to her home now. My mother will be one hundred years old in another eleven years, but there's one thing I am sure of. My mother will never......ever.......give up. She doesn't know how to do that. <