To be able to give a hug to a loved one, a beloved parent, well that’s a privilege to be cherished. And as I am quite aware when I read so many friends’ posts on Facebook, a large number of us ache to simply be able to relive, for a moment, those precious lost times. My own dear Mother is almost 100 years old. In exactly one month I’ll be at her side for her birthday. As I’ve written before, for the last eight or ten years I call her every evening, and on a good day, with no confusion or background noise, these calls are mutually profitable to say the least. We joke and laugh, we reminisce, we share hopes and projects, and she listens well and gives good advice. For even with her eyesight gone and her mobility greatly restricted, her mind is sharp.
Tonight’s call stood out nevertheless, and struck us both as particularly memorable and important in this journey. In French they say “vagabonder,” or flitting from subject to subject. The conversation led from today’s New Year’s Day concert from Vienna, which she caught on TV, to geography (as she is practically blind, she now has to recall the placement of European countries, and their distance from Paris), to modern politics – tensions brewing and despair here despite 70 years without war – to the latest unsettling situation with a new President in Brazil, to my noticing a particular homeless person who perches in the cold every day by the door of the bakery down the street. I give him change regularly, and Mom agreed I could offer to buy him a coffee someday. We jumped to cooking: the topic was my home-made dessert tonight made with freshly cut ripe pineapple cubes and a rich warm chocolate sauce flavored with Sauternes wine, which Mom wants to taste. That would normally be the end of a call.
Then followed the mention of that Japanese custom of repairing a broken dish, a bowl for example, with pure gold. Gold, instead of glue. We both loved the idea that those broken pieces, when put together this way, tell a story and can be seen to contribute even added value to the mended dish as the years pass. The obvious metaphor tonight was that as we face the variables of another new year, we can also view our own broken lives that somehow continue despite everything: we just carry on, each of us more valuable indeed for having gotten through some of the many lessons and struggles of life, up to this point and onwards. Mom carries her struggles with dignity: how she continued to work for so many years after Dad died in 1977 at age 64, how she later sold the house after 50 years and moved to an apartment which she occupied alone until her 97th year, how she now endures the day to day indignities and intrusions of a fully medicalized environment. Separated by an ocean, we both felt an unspeakable gratitude and a kind of tenderness for this particular conversation, facing – as we all do – another year of great uncertainty, and in signing off I promised to concoct especially for her the warm chocolate sauce and fresh pineapple chunks when I get back to the Village Green in LeRoy, NY, in the snowy depths of February. And I’ll be there for a priceless hug.
I thank Jim Fretz for the heads up, he’ll know what I mean.
Photo from July 2018