My timing is all off. After having spent the last two months with my mom, I’m not going to be with her on Mother’s Day. I left her some little presents and sent pretty Jacqui Lawson e-cards, and, of course, I’ll call. But we have long conversations almost daily, going over all kinds of things, from how our knees are feeling in whatever weather, to what we’re reading. (She just finished a library copy of the new David Baldacci thriller, me, John le Carre’s A Delicate Balance. She liked her book ok except for the high body count, I really liked the le Carre, war and spying gone corporate.)
Now I am reading Elizabeth Benedict’s What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-one Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most (Algonquin, paperback review copy), and loving the essays. Such a variety of gifts: Cecelia Munoz’s mother gave her a wok, Joyce Carol Oates’ mother gave her a quilt, Rita Dove’s mother gave her longed-for nail polish, Mary Morris’s mother gave her a passport and thus gave her the world.
But whether an expensive blouse or a tarnished piece of silver jewelry, the gifts are not only symbols of love but also the keys that unlock memories, allowing each woman to celebrate her singular relationship with her mother. In “Her Favorite Neutral,” Charlotte Silver talks about her beautiful mother’s penchant for animal prints and how she has handed on her personal sense of style, along with leopard print Italian ankle boots. She notes that her mother once remarked, “I just wasn’t capable of a small life in a minor key,” and she hopes to one day be able to say the same.
In a recent interview on NPR, Benedict said she asked the contributors to write about an object because she was afraid they’d “freak out” if she said ‘Write me a story about your mother.” By honing in on the specific, the writers avoid generalities, and yet the particular often evokes the universal.
Mmmm. I find myself thinking of the many things my mother has given me over the years. What one item would I choose? The gold locket that her mother gave her? The lime chiffon dress that we shared? The oval-framed antique photograph of her oldest sister as a little girl? The airplane ticket to New York for spring break?
Books, of course. Many, many books, starting with A Child’s Garden of Verses. I learned to read by her reading it to me, and then with me. “How would you like to go up in a swing?” or “Dark brown is the river,” or my favorite “Escape from Bedtime.” “The lights from the kitchen and parlor shone out…”
But there’s another book that came later, when I was 11. We were in our small branch library and I was complaining that I couldn’t find anything new to read in the childrens’ or teen shelves. My mother went to the adult fiction section and came back with a thick blue book. “Here, I think you’ll like this,” and handed me Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Then she told the head librarian I had her permission to wander freely in the adult stacks and check out whatever books I wanted. And so she gave me the world.
Thanks, Mom. Love you.
On a Clear Day I Can Read Forever 