{"id":204,"date":"2019-10-05T06:56:10","date_gmt":"2019-10-05T11:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/english.sxu.edu\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/?p=204"},"modified":"2021-04-07T16:17:36","modified_gmt":"2021-04-07T22:17:36","slug":"october-3-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/archives\/204","title":{"rendered":"October 3, 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today my mother would have been 90.  For the past few years on October 3rd<\/sup>, I\u2019ve had one strong thought about the date and the remembrance of my mother.  Odd:  When my mother was alive, I never once thought this thought.  She was just my mom (or \u201cMother\u201d as we kids referred to her\u2014never to her, but only years later when speaking of her;  another oddity.  Could you imagine addressing her as \u201cMother\u201d to her?  Are we British or East Coast aristocrats?).  But since she died, there\u2019s something about that date, October 3, 1929\u2026.  Today I learned it was a Tuesday, as I looked up the more famous date in that October than the third.  It was exactly three weeks later than October 3rd<\/sup>\u2014October 24th<\/sup>\u2014that that<\/em> Tuesday happened:  Black Tuesday.  A Tuesday with its own epithet.<\/p>\n

For the past few years, I\u2019ve been thinking about how my mother was born before the start of the Great Depression.  I wonder what those three weeks were like?  Did she take full advantage of the Roaring Twenties?  Did she, in Vicari, Sicily, bask in the success of the 1929 Cubs?  That\u2019s another new dimension added to my mother\u2019s memory bank, and it comes by way of her grandson, Terry, baseball historian, my son, and lover of the 1929 Cubs, as ill-fated a team as ever in the history of that ill-fated franchise.  So \u2026 it seems most unfair for my mom to have had those three weeks but to have been too young to really indulge in the party.  But my mother was not selfish or self-absorbed, and she never complained about that missed time.<\/p>\n

When I think of my mother, I think of her caring for me \u2026 and I think of every shameful thing I did.  Such guilt \u2026 I have to let it go.  I really didn\u2019t do anything shameful in a big way, but it\u2019s those little things, stupid kids\u2019 pranks that haunt me.  I remember a particularly dumb one I did, probably about the age of 12.<\/p>\n

\u201cMom, not everyone can do this.  It\u2019s a test of dexterity and concentration and mental capacity.\u201d<\/p>\n

[I probably didn\u2019t use words like \u201cdexterity\u201d and \u201ccapacity.\u201d]<\/p>\n

\u201cOkay, tell me what to do,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

She was always ready to help.  I recall that whenever I asked her for something, she gave it\u2014and not only for needed things, but for my hobbies and interests.  When I became a model builder and science geek, she helped me with the Visible Body\u2014the painting.  I could do the major organs\u2014the liver, stomach, colon, intestine\u2014but it was the veins and arteries on the plastic, clear skin that required dexterity and precision.  She painted the red and blue along the lines indicated on the inside shell of the skin\u2014and the finished model was a piece of art to me, fit for an anatomy class.<\/p>\n

\u201cTake this quarter [I handed her a quarter], and starting at the top of your nose, roll it down\u2014straight\u2014to the bottom of your nose.  That\u2019s it!\u201d<\/p>\n

What my mother didn\u2019t know was I had taken a pencil and had coated the edge of the quarter with pencil lead.  So she took the quarter, put it between her two index fingers, and proceeded to roll the quarter down her nose.  She did it easily and readily, and smiled at me.  And it was in that moment that the indelible shame set in.  For the trick worked:  she had a stripe of grey down her nose, and she looked perfectly ridiculous.<\/p>\n

It breaks my heart these fifty years later, and my eyes well up with tears as I write this in class with my students, all of us typing away.  I think of the simple goodness of a parent who would do anything for her child.  I think of her smile.  I think of the immediacy of my regret, and I wonder why\u2014why does our sense of humor prevent us from seeing the hurt we cause, even when we see it so clearly in the moment after?  My mother didn\u2019t express any anger or disappointment\u2014she just wiped her nose when I revealed the trick.  I wonder if she saw my regret, my horror at being mean to the kindest person in the world?  Did she worry about me living in regret for years to come?<\/p>\n

She made things easy.  Her life was hard\u2014but for us, she was there.  We took her for granted, and that was bad\u2014but really, the story was the absoluteness of her generosity.  I don\u2019t want to say she enjoyed it\u2014but it had that feel.  She was my barber for my first 30 years till she gave up her beautician business.  I remember her always being available for a haircut appointment.  It was always my schedule that mattered.  Her schedule?  She was there ready to be available when I needed her.<\/p>\n

As I write these words, I\u2019m feeling like a monster.  I was not \u2026 I was good.  But I somehow feel a need to exclaim:  I was not good enough.  I didn\u2019t deserve her.  But of course I did.  I loved her, and she loved me.  She loved all of us, in a way that was easy.  And in my life I\u2019ve seen so many mothers who behave so similarly.  It brings to mind my \u201cno explanation needed\u201d reflection I felt when Angelo died.  I clung to his friends and the family members who knew him and didn\u2019t need me to explain his sense of humor, his gestures, his quirky smile and expressions.  They all knew it, had experienced it\u2014and thus there was no burden on me to convey the reality and depth and feeling of the experience of him.<\/p>\n

I feel the same with my mother.  So many mothers in the world have precisely the same kind of selflessness, of generosity, of willingness to be and live for her children that my mother had.  So I feel others can relate\u2014can know\u2014just how deep the feelings go, how deep my shame goes for missed opportunities for kindness back, for saying thank you\u2014and<\/em> for avoiding mean, gratuitous acts that accomplish nothing but etching a pain in your soul.<\/p>\n

But stepping back from my malingering feelings, I hear her voice, and I see her smile and her easy way.  She had been through worse.  Her entry into the world on October 3rd<\/sup> meant she had to partake in the fall the collapse of the economic system, even in so far a place across the world as Vicari.  But she took the hit, and it must have formed her with a resilience and strength that were to help her raise and raise well five privileged brats who all, no explanation needed, grew to love her beyond human limitation.<\/p>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today my mother would have been 90.  For the past few years on October 3rd, I\u2019ve had one strong thought about the date and the remembrance of my mother.  Odd:  When my mother was alive, I never once thought this thought.  She was just my mom (or \u201cMother\u201d as we kids referred to her\u2014never to … Continue reading October 3, 2019<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,3,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ang","category-just-life-in-general","category-ssw"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":438,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions\/438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bonadonna.org\/sites\/wordpress\/bonadonna\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}