Strewn Wonder: Space between them
The morning sun lifts the surface of the pond into a fog. Not a wisp today but a movement. So many droplets—an uncountable number—and space bewteen them.
I drink my coffee and watch them rise and float, together but not entirely. There is a whorl. A break in the pattern. How does it happen?
The slightest change, a bit of warmth, catches the edge of a molecule. Pulls it. It tilts in a new direction, and others follow.
*
These men at the funeral stand out. Rough. Demure. Not dressed for the occasion in the same way my conservative, Catholic family is. I don’t know them. As far as I can tell, no one else does either.
But here they are, approaching the altar to pay their respects to my grandmother, the woman I knew as a matriarch, a smoker, a quick-witted Red Sox fan. She was also a nurse, but that part of her exists for me in stories. It happened away from us, in a hospital I only entered when she was sick.
I lean forward in the pew to watch them walk the aisle and then turn to leave.
Who was she? I wonder. And that question—the possibility that I may never know—opens a space inside my chest.
*
I am a lot like you, I tell my son. We are in the car, on the way to a doctor’s appointment—a rare moment just the two of us. So many of these things that are hard for you are hard for me too, I say. I worry the way you worry.
I tell him, No one talked to me about this when I was a kid.
I say, I’m still figuring it all out for myself.
I think I am showing him honesty and vulnerability, being a Good Parent. I think that I am holding him.
Without turning his eyes from the window, he tells me the thing it has taken me years to begin to tell myself: Don’t let anybody tell you who you are.
He is a warm wind. The car keeps moving forward. Together we lift and whorl.
It. Goes. So. Fast.: This is not my favorite way to describe time as a parent. But I love Mary Louise Kelly, longtime NPR reporter and anchor of All Things Considered. This excerpt from her new memoir, out this week, made me tear up and not even because of the pain of nostalgia, but for the complicated emotions around watching your children grow into themselves. I’ll be reading this one.
If you’ll be celebrating a book lover on Mother’s Day, I’ve got some ideas for you. Check them out, and enter to win a copy of Mother Brain:
Rose Hackman 4eva (see ):