This seems as good a time as any to once again mention that my mom once hit me with a bag of Fazio's Italian bread

My mom passed away one year ago today, so my choice here was either to write about how much we miss her and how wonderful she was, or to bring up the time she smacked me with a baked good.

I'm going with the latter.

For the record, though, we do miss her and she was wonderful. One of the best human beings I ever knew. You can't say enough about her.

But even Kathryn Tennant had her breaking point.

This is a story I relayed at her memorial service, but I love it so much I'll recap it here, too.

I'm guessing it was maybe 1978 or '79. That would have made me about 9 or 10, and my nephew Mark maybe 3 or 4.

My mom would often watch Mark while his mom, Mary, went off to work, so he was around a lot and, as I've often said, was more like a little brother to me than a nephew.

It was late afternoon and Mom was busying herself getting dinner ready, probably nearing the end of an exhausting day taking care of the two of us and trying to keep the house in some order.

I was doing something to irritate Mark. I don't know what, but it was enough that he kept crying and whining. We were in the living room, and Mom repeatedly yelled from the kitchen for me to stop it.

But apparently I didn't stop it. I kept right on doing whatever it was that was upsetting Mark, and he was making no secret of his displeasure.

Then, suddenly, seemingly from out of nowhere, Mom came storming out of the kitchen yelling at me to STOP IT. I looked up at her, and the next thing I knew, she had taken a full swing at me with a bag of Fazio's Italian bread. I don't know where it hit me, but the bag made solid contact and burst open, sending slices of bread flying around the living room.

I was stunned. Mom never hit me. It didn't hurt, but it was so out of the ordinary and so scary that I started crying. That, in turn, started Mark crying.

So there we were crying, and there was Mom, flustered and tired and on her hands and knees, crawling around the living room picking up pieces of far-flung bread.

In retrospect, it's one of the funniest things I have ever seen, though I obviously couldn't appreciate it at the time.

What I wouldn't give for some video evidence of that moment.

Boy, do I miss her.

My mom used to give me a dollar to go and buy a loaf of Italian bread at Fazio's. I got to keep 25 cents.

It was the early 80s, I guess. And when she was between shopping trips but the family needed bread, my mom would send me to the grocery store on my bike.

This bread was always Italian bread, mind you. Sliced with seeds from Fazio's, where she did most of our shopping. I don't have a drop of Italian blood in me that I know of, but that's virtually the only kind of bread we ever ate.

Anyway, the store was, I don't know, maybe a 5-minute bike ride from home if I hurried? No more than 10 minutes, for sure.

Once I got there, I would enter, take a right and cut through one of the cashier lines, then another right followed by a left to get to the bakery. I would order the bread, which would be placed in a see-through plastic Fazio's bread bag and handed over to me.

I would take the bread, get into a 12-items-or-less line, and pay for it using the crisp dollar bill Mom had likely gotten from the bank when she cashed Dad's last paycheck. The bread cost 75 cents. That left me with a quarter, and that quarter never made it home.

I would always insert it into the video game stationed at the store entrance. The game changed a few times over the years, but the one with the longest tenure that I can remember was Defender.

I loved Defender. I once wrote an article for a middle-school English class on how to succeed at the game. Mrs. Crow gave me an 'A' on it, God bless her.

I would stand there playing Defender for however long I could hold out before losing my allotted three ships. If I had done well enough (which occasionally happened), I would enter my initials into the game as one of the high scorers.

Then I would grab the bread, go outside, get back onto my bike, and ride home.

The whole process rarely took more than 45 minutes.

I would pay a large sum of money for the chance to go back and do it once more.

It was a simpler time, you understand.