--I WISH YOU’D WALK IN AGAIN.  IMAGINE IF YOU JUST DID.

 

What I’m Remembering Right Now

 

Your fingers made me different,
the gentle probing, the pruning of my hard edges,
the way you wrote code across my skin
when we were young and Lennon lived.
There are nights when I still feel the rim
of your fingernail carving letters down my spine,
a sonnet or something lovely,
something that might have even rhymed.
But the days have out-danced me now.
I’ve become bone instead of flesh,
sour-smelling and slack.
A nurse comes every other hour.
Her hands are rubber-gloved and fastidious.
She’s always seems to be in such a hurry.

 

Clinging to Loose Edges

When you called me

the worst thing that ever happened in your life
I should have stepped away,
stepped into the path of an oncoming semi
or leapt off a tall building.
But I lingered instead,
clinging to your loose edges
like an infant in need of suckling.
Your mother called me foolish.
Your Dad just laughed till he pissed himself.
Your brother spat out a wad of something brown and sticky,
said, “This one’s not recyclable,”
while cocking his head with a wink.

 

Holiday

What I keep forgetting

are the false holes we would fall through,
how sometimes I would float as if in quicksand,
a trapped target or piñata,
your face as ripe as eggplant,
telling me I should have been aborted,
should have been tossed in a dumpster
where milquetoasts like me belong.
But it’s May again,
so I take out my phone and call.
Before you even say hello,
I rush in to wish you
Happy Mother’s Day.

 

The Archer and the Pheasant

Dad is drunk again while

we are looking for ways to molt.
After dessert,
one of us is to hold an apple out at arm’s length
because Dad’s become an archer.
The thing is, he’s not kidding.
Gravity is an issue, so there’s some stumbling
against the kitchen counter, a jar knocked over,
a beer bottle broken.
“Go on,” he says, nudging with the bow.
I pick a watermelon instead,
since he won’t know the difference.
“Purrfect!”
There’s a first miss, and a second miss
that shatters a window over the sink,
spraying shards that nick my ear.
Still, I hold the melon in my palm
like an offering or docile monkey
while thinking about the pheasant I saw in the backyard earlier,
its rust-colored feathers,
the blood-red webbing around its wide eye,
how it cocked its head and seemed to say,
Good for you. You’ve survived so far.
When the arrow finally lands,
guts and seeds and juice splash my chest,
smell of sugar and summer filling the air.

 

Storm Lake at Night

The beaver,

dogpaddling across the lake,
is a decent friend of mine,
barely disturbing the water,
going his own way like a stubby raft
coasting toward the setting sun.
He hasn’t said a word for days,
leaves the fish alone most times.
He has other things on his mind--
a tree that needs slaying,
a damn that needs mending.
If I asked him why you left me
he’d probably say
it wasn’t even my fault.

 

Fishing

This is the perfect place

For drowning
Have you noticed?
It’s deepest in the cove
Where someone demolished
The beaver dam of evergreen limbs
Laced like arthritic fingers
Beneath the green-gray murk
Take the chain and tie it around my waist
Synch it tight because
I’m so thin now that people think I’m dying
Toss me overboard with an anchor
Count to one hundred backwards
Then float to the other end
Where all the really big fish
Are bored and biting

 

--WHAT A WONDERFUL TIME TO BE ALIVE

 

                                                                Ensemble

 

Just In Case

 

It doesn’t always happen the way they say it does—some poor girl, sexually abused by her dad, becoming a prostitute.  Sometimes you’re just industrious.  Sometimes the men are actually kind, fatherly or brotherly, preppy and toned with muscles, big-tippers, regulars who want to talk more than touch.  Sometimes it’s the best gig around.

At least that’s what you tell yourself on a suede-black night, staring out the motel window wondering where the moon is hiding.  You tell yourself the man in the bathroom is the prom king you worshipped from afar throughout high school.  You give him blonde locks of hair and denim blue eyes, teeth paper-white and straight as a picket fence.  You name him Randy Jarvis.

And when this new Randy reappears you don’t notice how his breath smells like Lysol, how his belly drags over the stump of his penis, but you do check under the pillow where you always stash the shiv, just in case.

You say, “What’ll it be?”  You ask how much time he has tonight.  You close your eyes while the rest happens and picture that missing moon glowing radioactive, the biggest thing in the universe, staring back at you like a bomb that can be dropped at any time.

 

An Unbroken Circle
 

You know the girl on the bed outside the bathroom resembles your daughter, that’s why you picked her, but you don’t think about it because thinking about it makes you queasy, a pervert of the worst order, even though she’s a hooker and has probably already lain with half a dozen men before the two of you ever walked through the motel door.

You just tried to urinate, but there was nothing doing.  This happens quite a bit lately and it’s another thing--on the long laundry list of others--that troubles you.

Your first prostitute was an Asian girl named Suki.  That was a lifetime ago, yet you remember her well because the fake name reminded you of sushi, which you loathe, and because she did this mewling act prior to fake-climaxing.  After her, there were thousands more which is why you work so hard, and after laboring so much to get ahead, you reward yourself with a little fun.  It’s an unbroken circle.

Before coming out of the bathroom, you give yourself a mental pep talk repeating positive affirmations:   I am a great lover.  I do not ejaculate too soon.  I control what happens.

When you open the door, the girl fluffs your pillow and props up on her elbows.  She’s chewing gum.  She blows a bubble the size of a light bulb until it pops, balloon-sticky on her nose.  Chuckling, she again reminds you of your daughter.

You turn off the lights.  Through the sheer, piss-colored drapes the sky is tar-black, no moon to light up anything.  You feel your way back to the bed like a blind man and then there’s skin on skin and everything begins again.

 

 
Ignited
 

You don’t like memories.  Recalling them is a slippery slope, a cord or rope wrapped around your neck, drawing you back to the places and times that ignited a bitter switch inside you.  But there are sirens going off in the city, not police cars screaming by, but fire trucks, and you must be close to the actual fire because you can see smoke twisting like black wraiths between two sky scrapers. 

You remember how you’d become a fuse yourself, and once you were lit there was no other way around it, strength you didn’t know you had coiling with rampant rage, so instead of saying the words he wanted you to say while he did it, one afternoon you told your father you would kill him, and you were a lot of things, even back then, but a liar wasn’t one of them.  That night as he lay slumped and passed out in front of a blaring TV, you got a gas can and spritzed gasoline and dropped your father’s lighter over a puddle.  Standing on the curb minutes later, you watched scarlet flames eat everything.  You stood until the house and he were ash, not caring if the neighbors saw you watching, not caring about the future or whether this was the last, selfish decision you’d ever get to make.

 

 

Names

 

You pay the girl double because she complied with everything you asked.  She says, “Hey, thanks, Bill,” even though your name isn’t Bill and she knows it’s not Bill.

This triggers something and so you ask the girl what her real name is.  The way her eyes stutter before she says, “Ashley” leads you believe she’s lying and this enrages you, the lies, the fraud and phoniness.  You’re the John, but you’re not feeling hypocritical one bit—it’s just fury swelling inside you.

You’ve never hit a hooker before, never hit a girl or woman in your life, but Ashley won’t give up her real name, and so you clock her on the chin.  It happens blink-fast, reflexively.

The girl goes wild, becoming a stallion suddenly.  She calls you a bastard.  Her hand leaps like a cobra out of her purse and she swings a shiv an inch from your bloated belly.

You say you’re sorry, you don’t know what got into you, hitting a girl isn’t something you’d ever do, honest.

She keeps her eyes—cobalt-blue eyes—on you as she leaves.  The door’s cracked open.  An old woman in a housecoat is lumbering down the hall.  She looks like your mother, same spider web hair and cigarette-wrinkled lips.  She looks up with a toothless grin and says, “Wanna dance?”

 

 

Folly
 

You think about quitting for the thousandth time.  It’s folly, but you do it anyway. 

This always happens after a visit with a bad John.  Once an obese medical supply salesman bit your shoulder so hard you had to have Holly, a now dead prostitute, stitch you up with something that might have been fishing line and the scar is usually the part of you, when naked, that customers find most alluring.

You’ve started using again—no needles this time—just huffing.  It’s a way to make the world flat and somewhat redeemable.  The pile of yellow powder looks like shredded drywall that someone’s mixed with piss.  You know this is leading right back to mainlining, yet you’ve lost the will to resist an easy release and lately your clients have had cruel streaks that show up out of nowhere.

Ohhhh.  Ahhhh. 

The burn is a torch scalding your nostril, reaching all the way down your throat to your chest, slamming your heart with a machete.  The sensation is familiar yet new all the same, like a twisted trick sprung on you by a crafty client—vibrator and penis inserted in your ass together.

Before the high seals, you think about what college life would be like, wearing a backpack, tramping through a campus with many brick buildings, kids your own age, not damaged to any major extent, their staid head nods and “Hi’s” plenty enough to make you feel vibrant and alive.

Next you think about a child you might have had, maybe a girl named Maggie with your same dimpled chin, her seated at the kitchen table coloring outside the lines of Ariel’s mermaid tail.  When she asks, “Momma, why are there bad people in the world?” you say, “It’s mostly bad men.”  Maggie looks up, her eyes blue as yours, saying, “But Daddy’s not bad.”  You look over at your husband doing dishes in the sink.  He cocks his head like a golden retriever—Huh?  Am I a bad guy?  You laugh and laugh and then the world goes pale yellow, becoming an endless rug that rolls you up in a magic carpet and carries you off.

 

 

Empty Backpack

 

You stole a Gideon’s Bible from a Hilton hotel the first time you picked up a hooker, thinking if you read some of it right afterward, the shame and guilt would dissipate.  Now the Bible stays in your car, in the cubby buried beneath stacks of porn magazine featuring lithe and ridiculously slender girls who look younger than their stated eighteen years of age.

You pull over two blocks from where the hooker procession begins, a mile from the airport, and root around in the car’s glove compartment.  The Bible is stiff.  Its cover feels waxy, like cadaver skin.  You open it up and read a scene where Jesus is forgiving an adulteress who has fornicated with seven different men. “Go, and sin no more,” Jesus tells her.

The girl you pick up is just that--a girl; pigtails and bobby socks, tartan skirt and an empty backpack, her teeth glittering with braces.  Her fresh-faced nature is stunning yet odd because most of the prostitutes have a used, withered look about them, like ill-fed livestock.  You feel shitty for making this last comparison, even though it’s just something in your head, but it’s those thoughts jangling inside your skull that are the most destructive.

You ask if the girl, Casey, has a place to go and she does.  It’s a remodeled Motel 6 south of the airport.

Entering, you feel something’s off, but you’ve been thinking about having her since she first smiled, all that metal encasing her teeth winking back at you.

You pay her and go to the bathroom as you always do.  Never once has a hooker walked out on you, because that’s how they get a bad reputation and put out of business.

Staring in the mirror you see the results all of the drinking and excess eating you’ve done but you rationalize it right away with the excuse that it’s impossible to get fit with as much travel as you have to do.

You try to pee but can’t.

You disrobe and wrap a stiff towel around your waist but have to hold the two ends together because it’s not long enough to tie over your gut.

When you open the door there’s a man with a ski mask holding a pistol inches from your face.  You feel urine run down your thigh.  The man demands your wallet.  You tell him, “Okay, hey sure, just relax.”  The towel falls off you as you search your pants.  You finally find your wallet, take out all the cash and hand it to him but he says, “No, I want the wallet and your cell phone.”  When you say, “Oh come on,” he stabs the pistol against your forehead and there’s no way to think he won’t shoot unless you comply.

After he’s gone, you sit on the edge of the bed trembling, bawling.  It’s the first time you’ve cried since you were a kid.  You hate yourself for crying and for not following your instincts when you walked into the room.  You hate yourself for so many things.

You practice different scenarios out loud, picturing your wife’s reaction, chin drooped against her clavicle bone the way she always does when she’s sure you’re lying. 

The mattress starts to tremble.  You think it’s an earthquake but the walls aren’t buckling. 

You whimper.  It makes you remember Suki, your first prostitute, and her mewling noises.

You rewind your life back to age nineteen or so.  The girl on the riverbank sunbathing nude curls her finger, you thinking it a mirage.  You consider what this means, only now, in your middle-aged head, you look away.  She’s young enough to be your sister.  She’s poison, even if she’s not.

 

 Rainbow

 

This client is into weird shit.  He likes to be handcuffed and choked.  He wants you to slap him and leave fingernail scratches down his back.

It’s a nice switch, being the dominate one for a change, and you have at it with abandon. 

When the session is over he says, “Wow, you did great,” as if you’re a personal trainer from the gym.  He promises to be back for more.  “We’ll ratchet it up a little next time,” he says.

The rest of the evening’s Johns are not as inventive, but it’s a calm night without incident unless you count the one college kid, drunk off his ass, who threw up right after his orgasm.

The dingy apartment building where you live has different colored doors.  Yours is lime green, the only thing about the place that appeals to you.   

When you were a very young child you liked to color and sometimes you’d even create your own images on clean white sheets of paper.

A woman who was not your mother came home one night when your mom was staying at Aunt Jean’s.  The woman had long wine-colored hair and big brassy earrings.  She smelled like Lemon Pledge and told you your pictures were pretty.  You knew she was lying but you said, “Thanks” just the same.  In the middle of the night you had to pee so you got up and saw the woman and your father naked on top of each other on the living room rug.  You thought your dad was trying to kill her because the woman was making choking sounds, like being strangled.

In the morning the woman was gone and at breakfast when you told your dad what you saw he stood up without a word, took off his black leather belt and used on your behind until you begged him to stop.  “That’s what you get for meddling,” he said.

You’re exhausted, but don’t feel sleepy.  You go to retrieve your drugs from where you’ve hidden them but remember you finished off the remainder of the stash last night.

Your skin itches.  It’s not DT’s, just a sense of dread that this is going to be your life forever, even though you’ve only ever seen one or two old women prostitutes. 

Loneliness washes over you in tsunami fashion.  Your friends, if they’re even that, are all hookers or drug dealers.  So you take out your cellphone and dial a random number using the prefix of the city where you grew up.  You keep doing that until someone answers and  each time they do you stay on the line without speaking until they hang up.  You do this for hours.

After you’ve finally slept and eaten and it’s time to start work again, you dress but instead of going to your street corner you travel in the opposite direction where there’s a small strip mall.  Hanging lopsided in the window of a boutique that sells children’s clothes is a Help Wanted sign.  You have no resume or references, but you promise yourself to come back tomorrow during the day when they’re open. 

You look up at the night sky, star-filled for once, and pledge to a God you can’t see that this will be your last night of hooking.  As if on cue, something bright flares across the sky like a powerful firework that suddenly peters out almost as soon as its flight begins. 

But that’s enough.  You still believe in signs and omens.  You’re still optimistic after all.

You blow the sky a kiss and leave, skipping, singing “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” so loud that you can feel your toes stinging.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

--IN THE END, EVERYTHING BECOMES A PLEA

 …I reread Anna Quindlen’s book, “A Short Guide To A Happy Life” again.  It had been a while.  The title is very accurate when it comes to describing what the book is.

I thought there were a ton of life lessons and reminders and thought you might appreciate seeing them:

“It’s so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.”

“I show up.  I listen.  I try to laugh.”

“You cannot really be first rate at your work if work is all you are.”

“Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the sand dunes.”

“Remember that love is not a leisure, it is work.”

“Every time I look at my diploma, I remember that I am still a student, still learning every day how to be a human.”

“Realize that life is glorious and you have no business taking it for granted.  Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around.”

“All of us want to do well.  But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.”

“Mortality is the greatest gift God ever gave us.”

“It is so easy to exist, instead of live.  Unless you know there is a clock ticking.”

“I have found that one horrible year has given me a perspective on all the things I wouldn’t have otherwise had.”

“After my mother died of cancer at age 40 when I was 19 I was never again going to be able to see life as anything except a great gift.”

“C’mon, let’s honest.  Each of us has an embarrassment of riches.”

 “I never think of my life, or my world, in any big cosmic way.  I think of it in all its small component parts: the snowdrops, the daffodils; the feeling of one of my kids sitting close by.”

“Something really bad happened to me.  But it taught me that this life is not a dress rehearsal, and that today is the only guarantee you get.”

“I learned to look at all the good in the world and to try to give some of it back, because I believed in it completely and utterly.  And I tried to that, in part, by telling others what I had learned, even though so many people thought I sounded Pollyanna.”

“Think of life as a terminal illness, because, if you do, you will live it with joy and passion, as it ought to be lived.”

“School never ends.  The classroom is everywhere.  The exam comes at the end.”

-- Anna Quindlen

 

 

 

--SOME THINGS ARE REALLY HARD TO GET USED TO

 

…Tomorrow is Mother’s Day.  My mom passed away almost five years ago and I gave the eulogy at her funeral.  At that point I’d only be a few years retired from a job where I spend close to fifty percent of my time doing public speaking.  There could be crowds of twenty or hundreds and I rarely got nervous.

I was petrified doing this, though.
Here it is:

Mom’s Eulogy 11/4/11

This is a eulogy for my mother and a small tribute to the family she left behind…

                Like my brothers who are here today, I grew up on the north side of poor and didn’t realize it until there was nothing to be done but work hard, listen well, mind yourself, respect others, and—if you were able--share.

                Sharing is a kind of bravery when you don’t have much.  It’s Biblical in the purest sense.

                My dad is, and always was, a genius with his hands, a mechanical artiste hardly matched by anyone in the entire state.  Time and time again he tried to share his knowledge of mechanics with me, but I preferred poetry to Peterbuilts, books instead of bolts.  Lovingly, he called me “Sally” and “Flower Child” because I had long hair and wore puka shells like David Cassidy, my idol, from “The Partridge Family.”  So, whether or not he meant to, my dad taught me that it was okay to be different, to be a nonconformist, so long as you were true to yourself.

                My brothers were larger than life to me, and from them I got mounds and mounds of Hand Me Downs.  I’d get ornate western shirts with pearl snap buttons, yoke-stitched shoulder seams, and silver-tipped collars.  They were fine shirts, something a countrified Elvis might wear—but they were usually four sizes too big for me and typically most had an unbleachable rust-stained patch of Ring Around Collar.

                I also got their coats and gloves and hats and ratty old sweaters that resembled boneless cats.  It was always an honest thrill to receive a new article of clothing because I figured if the item had once been good enough for them, it was doubly adequate for me—as if by sweating on the garments, my brother’s had somehow doused and blessed them with Holy water.

                For many years, I owned exactly one pair of jeans.  Once, during baseball practice, a fellow player slid in high and cleated me in the knee so rough and hard and deep that it splayed my tendons open like lasagna, and you could even see bone.  When I got back from being stitched up, Mom washed those jeans and sewed the flap and I continued to wear those pants until I outgrew them (Ironically, the pattern formed a huge L, as if I was wealthy and had started monogramming all my clothes, even casual apparel like denim.

                Because I was shy and essentially friendless, I spent a lot of time in our kitchen.  I would read at the table or practice my penmanship by copying the first fifty pages of the dictionary.  Every day Mom was there cooking.  She used oversized kettles and pans, gigantic, steroid-infused cutlery, hardcore cookware you’d expect to see in the military. 

                There were a lot of us kids, many hungry boys with insatiable appetites, and she meant to take care of us.

So she’d toil for hours on end, Mother would, dropping bags of potatoes into a cloud of steam, using a rolling pin to flatten a blanket of bread dough, slathering glaze over a tin of caramel rolls. 

It was all very workman-like yet fascinating.  Watching her cook, or bake, was akin to witnessing Michelangelo paint, Rodin sculpt or Lawrence Welk conduct his Champagne Orchestra.

                Mother made homemade donuts and bread and cream puffs and Aunt Anne’s cake and Glorified Rice and dumplings, German dishes with strange names like Fleisch Keeklah that really amounted to nothing more than fried dough and hamburger.  I thought she must be a chemist, a magician, or at the very least, the best cook on the planet.

                When I’d run out of things to tell her, I’d make them up.  I don’t know if she knew I was lying or if she was even that interested in my outlandish stories, but Mom let me ramble on and on.  I was really just trying to impress her.  Back then, a huge goal of mine had been to make my Mother love me without condition.

                One spring when I got really bored and complained about having nothing to do, Mother handed me a plate of rolls and said, “Here, take this to the Lemelys.  They live a mile and half over that hill.  Tell them I said you needed to be put to work.”

                I had no idea who the Lemelys were or if there was even a house a mile and half over the craggy landscape that was our back yard, but Mom’s instructions were always meant to be carried out, and to veer from them was a very unwise decision—like cheating on your taxes or spouse, like relying on the rhythm method for your birth control.

                And so I did.  I grabbed the rolls and ran.  And just as she’d predicted, there was a house and a kind old man named Homer Lemely who took the caramel rolls with a big grin, handed me a rake, and after watching me work like a fiend for two hours, hired me on the spot.

                Work was an important element of our lives—in the lives of being a Kuntz, a Volk, or a Hauff.  When you don’t have much, what you do have are two clear-cut choices: to whine about not having anything, or to get busy.

                In our family, we were always some sort of busy.

                But being busy—for us anyway--often meant getting over yourself, steeping yourself in survival, ignoring embarrassment that others might equate with shame.

                We raised cows—Kathy and Irene, Go Go and Thunder--that we milked each morning before school.  We had chickens that Mom butchered.  We had a makeshift garden and after harvesting, Mom would drive me down to Two Schwabbies.  Working out a deal with the store manager, I’d be allowed to sell vegetables in front of the store.  “Cucumbers, cucumbers, ten cents each!” I’d shout.  Invariably I’d see a schoolmate who would gawk then stiffen like an erection, as if I were some diseased leper.  Or often times there’d be some lady who would see me, stop and ask, “My God, aren’t you Joe and Alice’s son?” in a horrified voice that might as well have asked, “Aren’t you Michelle and Barrack Obama’s son?”  On a good day, I might make four or five bucks, which Mom would collect, note on a ledger, and save for me inside a stained envelope labeled with my name.

                During summers, Mom took us to the fruit fields where we picked strawberries, pie cherries, raspberries, and sometimes corn.  We were the only white family among groups of Hispanic migrant workers.  Mother was a Checker.  Her job was to make sure no one loaded the bottom lug or flat with rocks and leaves instead of fruit.  Her task was to sign off on each carton, tell workers where to pick, and generally, just run the show.  It was a man’s job, but my mother could be as tough and ornery as any male when she wanted to, and I think she was--by all accounts--a pretty damn good Checker. 

                Before The World’s Fair in 1974, Mom would drive a school bus down to the river, to a very sketchy area known as “Skid Row.”  Always we arrived before dusk, usually at 4 am.  When she’d honk the horn, the bums and winos would saunter out of the foggy dark like constipated zombies.  They’d trundle up on the bus, and then mom would drive them to the cherry orchards where they’d pick fruit, get cash money on the spot, sing old Buck Owens songs with their bottles dangling from branches, drunk as one-legged dogs, burping and farting in key.  I was 10 and 11 at the time, but I still recall the friendly, rank stench of those bus rides to and from the fields—it was a kind of cat pee-meets-lighter fluid-meets-Windex odor, and to get through the journeys, I plugged my nose and breathed through my mouth.  I remember Mom driving, smoking, wearing cat-eye glasses, tapping her fingernail on the steering wheel, looking tough as steel as she sang Loretta Lynn songs.  I think the men on board both feared and respected her.  They certainly didn’t give her any guff.

                There are a lot of quirky but true stories, similar to those, that I could tell, but time is short and no one likes a story that never ends.

                So, lastly, I just like to say that whether she knew it or not, Mom shared a way of living with me, with us.

                She taught us how to love and she taught us how not to love.

                She was hardly perfect.  None of us are.  The examples she set were sometimes unorthodox, often far from textbook, never Dr. Spock-approved, but if you looked and listened you could gain a sense of how to survive, even if history was a disloyal friend, even if the brightest odds looked bleak.

                Mom taught the value of dollar, the importance of hard work, the value of service to one’s country, exemplified through the examples of my brothers here today. 

                She taught me that life can in fact be both simple and full at the same time.

                She taught me that it’s better to be surrounded by a gaggle of noisy kids than to be sequestered alone in an empty room.

                She showed me the importance of family and the necessity of a loyal, loving spouse, and how in the end those things are what’s true, how they become a kind of living legacy.

                We don’t pick our parents—none of us do—but we do get to pick what we remember of our parents, or at least how to use what our parents taught us to better inform and shape our life.

                My mother, my brothers’ mother, my father’s spouse—she was a complicated and paradoxical woman. 

                She was many things.

                She was a young girl, someone’s daughter, a farmer’s daughter, a farmer, cook, chef, model, lover, spouse, bible salesman, bus driver, field hand, foreman and Mariner’s fan.

                She was a tiny stick of dynamite that could take out an entire building or someone’s self-esteem.

                She was a lot of things, but in the end, she was my mother.  She me—gave us, her children—life.

So it seems only fitting that at a moment like this, on a day like today, that we fill our hearts with kind remembrance, that we give our mother a full measure of gratitude, that we wish her all of the grace and God’s love we would humbly wish for ourselves.

Thank you, and thank you for being here.