Thinking of my mother

 From "The Pleasure of My Company" by Steve Martin.

It was not that I missed her; she was far from me by the time it was all over that our communications had become spare.  She lived in me dead or alive.  Even now, the absence of her letters is the same as getting them for when I have the vague notion that one is due, I feel the familiar sensation of comfort that I did when I held a physical letter in my hand.

She lives in me dead or alive.  I'm still struggling with the horror that the mother who I carry is the one I didn't recognize - the new one - the one who was sad and afraid and didn't like me.  I hope and fear for the day that she steps aside for the funny, warm, supportive mother I spent most of my life thinking I could never live without her.  On that day that I welcome her back into my heart, I will break. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Alone with You in the Ether by Olivie Blake

 ...art is tragedy.  Art is loss. It's the fleeting breath of a foregone moment, the intimacy of things undone, the summer season that passes.  It's the peeled lemon and bony fish in the corner of a Dutch still life, rotten and dead and gone. It's him lying next to you, legs tangled with yours, only to know he'll be specter in your thoughts by next month, next week, ten minutes from now.  This is what makes it art, Charlotte, and you've always understood that.  You've always understood, above everything, that what makes beauty is pain. Every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else.  It seems like it's the right shape but it's slightly different every time, so that eventually, very very quietly and over days and days and days, you are tranasformed into something unrecognizable, and it happens so slowly you don't even notice, like shedding scales and making new ones. What an appropriate passage t...
Read more

The Antidote by Karen Russell

 I am here to depsit the first time I drank a strawberry soda.  Mountains of ice and underneath a greiny pink slush, a taste like what I imagined kissing to be.  The fizz rose to my brain and I heard God and God said: order a second strawberry soda, Bertie.  I never want the memory of that first drink to fade.  When I'm an old man and all my senses have dulled, I want to taste my twelfth summer again-- The Antidote is a prairie witch.  Maybe you are like me and haven't run into a prairie witch before.  Maybe after the WWII they all retired.  But a prairie witch is a person who absorbs the memories of her clients into herself and stores them.  The client is thereby freed of the memory but can collect it back at any later time- so long as he retains the receipt with the identifying number.  Sometimes people want to bank special memories to relive later (see above) but, more often, they want to forget something horrible, painful, and, parti...
Read more

Books, 2024

All Systems Red by Martha Wells Library of Souls by Ransom Riggs When Fairies go Bad by Ursula Vernon (Z) The Map of Days by Ransom Riggs Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult Swimming with Bridgeport Girls by Anthony Tambakis The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly The Last by Hanna Jameson Epic Zero (2):  (Z) Geronimo Stiltson: Curse of the Cheese Pyramid by  (Z) The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman Thornhedge by T, Kingfisher (pen name of Ursula Vernon of Dragonbreath fame!) The Story Hour by Thrity Umrigar St. Lucy's School for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell Shrek by William Steig (Z) Danny Dragonbreath in The Frozen Menace by Ursula Vernon (Z) The Mauraders by Tom Cooper Hamster Princess: Of  Mice and Magic by Ursula Vernon (Z) Harriot Hamsterbone by Ursula Vernon (Z) Starter Villain by John Scalzi Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood The Masked City by Genevieve Cogman The Burning Page by Genevieve Cogman Fiction Land by RR Haywood Sleep Donation: A Novella by Karen ...
Read more