Memorial Remarks for My Mother

Once upon a time, when the bricks of his life were yet uncracked, still sun-warmed, and the mortar was crisper in its eggshell white, a small boy broke his mother’s heart. In his pale fist he held a porcelain figurine, one of several his mother held dear and which she had lovingly arranged along windowsills...his tiny hand held the best one—a genuine Hummel...a small boy with blonde wavy hair, hiding an armful of flowers—or apples, as his eyes preferred to see, chestnut-colored and fragrant crimson—and at his feet appeared a tiny dog. She treasured it above all others, because it was special, because it was well-made and artistic—and because she thought it looked a little like the boy who now held its fate in his hand. The porcelain boy looked perhaps more rosy-cheeked and shining, and, sad to say, less cruel. He was fussing now, tantrum-mouthed and stormy-eyed, knowing he shouldn’t touch it, let alone lift it above the cast-iron shimmer of the bathtub. She treasured them both, the statue and her son, and her vocal pitch rose second by second. He was mad; why shouldn’t he hold this special treasure, play with it...dash it? In a moment, in the crash of starlings slain, he had smashed it in the tub, and his mother’s voice broke, cracked with nightmare. He started to cry, as did she...why had he been so bad? So plainly and simply awful? He wept, knowing he had ruined one of the finest things in his tiny world, sensing that he could never take that moment back…

She wept, and he cried his weary eyes out, and then—then she cradled them both, both statuette and her child; and she would, in time, glue the pieces back carefully together. Tiny arms are weaker than their bearers believe, and the breaks were not so bad...only a few flawed chips were lost eternally...and within a month the wounded figurine was atop a shelf once more, albeit higher and further from the small boy’s reach. He would watch it carefully, over the next dozen years or more, remembering that blighted and unpleasant hour of his youth, and feeling like the Hummel was both judging him, and forgiving him, with every glance he stole.

******

Dympna Theresa Rice was born at the dawn of the Great Depression, to two beautiful and hardscrabble Irish folk on whom you could still smell the salt water of their crossing; she came of age during years lean as cornsilk, when the gas lamps and lanterns of the world were guttering out, with every summer’s turning seemed to draw a newer darkness upon its people, with bread lines and lined faces, with war and rumors of war.

Yet when she spoke of her childhood she summoned up a world of droop-shouldered apple boughs and the deep yeasty hearts of fresh-burned bread; the crackly ghosts of radio’s night mysteries and stoop-swept vocal croonings; the sugared shape of meal-sweet pears dropping soft on fallen lawns; of playground games curtailed but, like fresh eggs and caster sugar, beaten on inside the heart of every child of that twilit age. She smacked her lips at salt-brined pickles in barrels cold and as long as her arm, and at the gossamer scoops of plain ice cream… Dympna skipped along North Shore streets when every Buffalo nickel was round real money, and each torchlit Mercury dime was fat ripe gold.

She grew up enflamed with love and complete devotion to her family, her mum and dad, her sister and brother, and to her eight ensorceled cousins who grew up right next door.

Another turning came, and one afternoon she glimpsed, astride a glassy slope, at a pretty little sleepaway camp called Wamindi, her future husband Walter. Tucked away in the New Hampshire green, when young men and young women came to meet away from a world in which each were still largely separated from the foibles of the other, he noticed her that day, and she noticed him. Racing down the hill like foxfire, he leaned into the car she was in, sneakily kissed her cheek, and promised: “you, I’ll remember.” And she would never forget that purloined smooch, and from a promise came a courtship and both brought forth nearly fifty-seven years of blessed, briar-rosed marriage. 

She made a driftwood castle for her Walter in the unrambled Weymouth woods, and she nurtured and loved two sundanced children, and all their faults and foibles, their tangled smiles and sunburnt follies...their eyebright morning songs and happiness, their sullen let-me-bes... 

My mother stitched and cooked, buttered and booked, splintered and spanned, watered vegetables, spruced azaleas, and tended both the ache of battered hearts and the batting from fraying pandas. She was forever gluing and sewing, handling and praying, worrying and warming, forever making new the rubbled and the torn, the rumpled or the shorn, forever piecing together the fragments of our wounded spirits, comforting the mere afeared, embracing the truly terrified. She held us, and composed us: she put upon high shelves those who needed protection, and hugged those closest who needed to be brave.

What I will remember, fiercest of all, is the feeling of her hand upon my forehead, and the warmth of her voice when she called me her honeybunch. Would that I be blessed to remember everything she ever said or did, every way she ever looked, until my own time on earth is all but cindered.

******

Once upon a time, when the fickle fragments of my life were still apparent whole, I thought I broke my mother’s heart.

But I was wrong. She was not so fragile...she was iron and porcelain, green and golden, and she was as strong as a storm. She put both fractured Hummel figurine and tormented small blond boy back together in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, and I loved her for it. Oh dear God I love her still.

But now my mother’s passed away.

She is gone, and I, heart-broken, must put all these tear-worn pieces back together on my own.

I love you, mama. I will love you forever. And I will be thankful for all the love you gave me, the love you gave to all of us...for the love you were, and are, and ever shall be.

So, as we were, in one beholden, flagrant, perfect age,

Young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held us, green and dying,

Though we sang in our chains like the sea.

---t.a.

nov 2, 2021