Today would have been my mom’s 84th birthday.  This shot was taken at my grandmother’s home on School Street in West Oneonta, which she bought with the pension settlement she received from the Delaware & Hudson Railroad for the accidental death of her husband during a coal chute fire in March 1946.  Mom was only 8 years old when that happened, leaving my grandmother to raise six kids by herself.

This shot was probably taken on a visit home from Albany Business College in the mid-50s.  Pretty soon after she’d make a series of life decisions that would alter her life in significant ways, some beatific and many alarmingly tragic, but all with life-altering consequences she could never have predicted.  But then again, don’t we all?

I dump a lot of baggage on the doorstep of my mother’s life and who she was as an earthling, because I forget how badly each of us falls short of the mark.  If I’m not paying attention (which is most of the time) I hold her to an alien standard that exists only in the barren insanity of the human mind.  It manifests in how I deal with other family members, friends and pretty much everybody else.  I’ve even allowed it to infect my writing, and while I’ve known forever that acceptance and forgiveness are gifts you ultimately give yourself for the benefit of others, I often make a hard exception for her.

Last night, however, I had a vivid dream – I don’t have many – where I was investigating some historical aspect of a home with its aging occupants and it was revealed to me that one, an elderly woman in a cotton house dress and black, horn-rimmed glasses, was a medium.  I asked her if she could describe heaven for me, and with a tired nod she removed her glasses and rose, slowly.  While slipping into trance, she gingerly swept the fingers of both hands in semi-circles across the dusty farmhouse table around which all of us sat, the motes of dust from each fingertip pirouetting up into the late afternoon sunlight arcing in from somewhere, anywhere.

“Imagine being kept afloat in an ocean for so long that you can’t remember the sight, sound or feeling of land, and imagine that night has never once visited as you drift, nor has the sun ever shown itself beyond a perpetually overcast sky, the clouds like late-February snowbanks sprayed with the grime of the street,” she said in a parched but jubilant tenor.  Suddenly, it was happening.  I was there, it was so humid, and riotously, choppy waters – which should have been drowning me – pushed me forward, unnaturally.  “And then suddenly one morning the sandy, rocky seaweed-strewn ocean floor appears beneath you, and your feet scrape painfully across its sandy surface.  They are cut on broken conches, clams and cockles, and your toes stub painfully against softball-sized igneous rocks and the saltwater stings you into consciousness.  Minutes later, the clouds part and a blazing yellow sun bakes everything else into virtual incandescence.  The air smells like dirty cacciatore and the white noise of the sea eats you like a communion wafer.  The horizon evaporates into azure and each cresting wave, like the pulse of arteries, is tipped with its own white-hot shard of light, the black and blues and browns of this living canvas, is at once everything becoming, breathing, regressing, conceding, evolving, dying.  It has been so long since you’ve seen the sun my sweet, sweet child.  So, so long.”

That’s all she said, and I woke to the sour taste of goddess breath.

I was warned long ago that’s how clemency would land on the tongue.

Happy birthday mom.