What is now a long time ago — Driving my son to school — a school half an hour and a couple of interstate highways away and which started at 8:00 sharp — not talking much because of the earliness and the dark of the morning, letting the radio play its music. Without looking over at him, I reach my right hand over to him, palm up. He touches it, precisely in the center of […]
My mother thought that inner strength, moral strength, moral superiority, were best dealt with through silence. It was the best thing to do to appear unaffected by the traumatic event one was just passing through or had recently endured. After Aunt Sudie’s death, a few days before which my mother could be heard from behind the closed door of her bedroom shouting “But why me?”, my mother moved through the house slow and dazed in […]
The firewood was always freshly stacked in its brass bin by the fireplace in the den each winter afternoon. When I was little, I would try to carve this wood with the blade of the letter opener that sat with its matching pair of scissors and note pad by the telephone in the bar. This was the only blade that I could get my hands on. The logs were soft and prone to splintering and […]
“You have your whole life ahead of you.” I was seventeen and in the throes of a toxic relationship with my mother. An English teacher of mine gave me that bit of advice in a long stream of advice that I have otherwise forgotten. I’m 54 now, but it suddenly occurs to me that the advice is still good: I still have my whole life ahead of me. In retrospect, I don’t think she would […]
At around the time that I left for college, the emptiness and loneliness that were unavoidably attached to our remote house finally got to my mother. Mom’s mothering instincts, which didn’t lessen with my leaving, needed an object. At that time, teddy bears were enjoying a surge of popularity among children, and thus my mother settled upon them as a target for her mothering instincts. My own childhood teddy bear, given to me by my […]
I had planned to write some yesterday, since it was my mother’s 85th birthday, as well as the fifth anniversary of her death. I’d like to have written something profound, but I think I said all of that at the time of her death. I’ve thought about her a lot since then, as I suppose most everyone would. The past couple of years, however, have been a new kind of sorting out of my thoughts. […]
Again, I find myself in Miami Beach (or environs, rather — I am in a place north of MB called Sunny Isles). The tedium that you hear in the reading of that sentence has been building for several decades. We always came down here for vacations, Easter vacation especially. I went to a catholic girls’ school, so we had Easter vacation instead of spring vacation; we were very non-PC. I remembered these vacations yesterday when […]
