Maternal Celebration

If she had kept on living, today my mother, shown above, would be observing her 113th birthday, but regretfully she had to leave in 1977. She was born in New Orleans in 1896.

My mother was a wonderful woman. She was a strong woman, and I increasingly marvel at the wide variety of adversities that she faced for a long time, and I regret the way that the cheerful veils of childhood kept me from glimpsing just how serious things were. Yet she wore them down and eventually prevailed over all.

At the center of her troubles was the chance that her husband of 22 years died nearly on the eve of World War 2, in 1938, when the Great Depression was still in progress, and that left her, a housewife, alone with no money, a small house, and two small children that she was bound and determined to carry through to adulthood and beyond if need be, no matter what.

I was probably my mother's greatest triumph in life. I don't at all mean the person that I became, or the person that I am now. I mean instead the very fact that was I born at all. Up to then, back in those dark ages of health care, she had suffered a long series of miscarriages, and she had had to bring me in only at a huge risk to her own life, but she did it.

I wonder what it was about my mechanism that allowed me to come down the chute safely, when all those others did not. And I wonder who all those quasi older siblings of mine would've been and how they would've been. But those are among those deep imponderables that take such delight in being impervious to all reasonable speculation.

My mother probably saw some great added significance in the fact that I arrived just two days before her own birthday.

This post opened with a picture of my mother and me, amidst all the marble of the downtown D.C. of 1931. Obviously it was taken just days after her Big Moment.

A year later my mother also bore a healthy girl, and that was it.

Now all those people who loved me without reservation of any kind are gone -- my mother, my father, and my sister -- and like Ishmael in "Moby Dick, "I only have escaped alone, to tell thee," whatever the story may be.

Often I try to reconstruct the ambience of being around my mother. Sometimes I succeed.

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