A Letter to My Mother on Her 88th Birthday

Dear Mom, 

Happy Birthday! 

It’s *not* hard to put into words how grateful I am for your lifelong love and nurturing. It’s a simple fact that without your calm and steady strength, I would have fallen off the planet long ago. 

Most of what I truly treasure — the things that give me deep joy — are values and appreciations fostered by you at an early age. 

You never thought a fascination with butterflies and beetles was the slightest bit strange. Indeed, you shared it with us and instilled it in us, showing us how to make nets from coat-hanger wire, broom handles, and old pillowcases, and ether jars with cotton balls and coffee filters. Fifty years later, and I still have my beetle collection, now supplemented by other collections of skulls and antlers, rocks and fossils. I am my mother’s child. 

Did anyone else’s mother make butterfly and praying mantis cages out of window-wire netting curled into cylinders and anchored into cake pans filled with plaster of Paris at the bottom, with another cake tin at the top to serve as a lid? Mine did, and as a consequence, I have spent over 5 decades in hedgerows marveling at chrysalis and cocoon, carrion beetles and horn worms. There is a world of wonder to be found in a strip of abandoned field, if only you will look. 

I grew up with hundreds of chicken eggs, carefully marked “X” and “O” on opposite sides with a pencil so they could be hand rotated several times a day over a 21-day hatching cycle by your consistent and punctual hand. A lightbulb provided heat and a water pan provided humidity, but the hard lessons about the vagaries and vicissitudes of life came from infertile eggs and from the poor unfortunates with imperfect yolk absorption who were quickly attacked and killed by their chirping and rapacious brethren. Mother Nature is not for sissies, and she always bats last. 

I have spent many decades with terriers, a seed first planted by you when you brought back a $5 black and white runt acquired from the back of a pet store on Pennsylvania Avenue. Scoot traveled from DC to Morocco, and Kansas to Algeria to Arlington before eventually settling under a marble headstone in the backyard of 1712 19th Street. All the other terriers that have followed — Stuff (1 and 2), Pearl, Darwin, Barney, Trooper, Sailor, Gideon, Haddie, Misto, and Moxie — are the fruit of that slip of a dog that you planted in our hearts. 

Above all, you showed us that if you pulled on any one thing, you would find it was connected to everything else. Travels in Europe and North Africa were a dizzying parade of dates and invasions, but the essential message was that everything had a past and few things were entirely self-made. The Romans had been everywhere, and the Moors had marched through Spain and even into Rome. History was about connections, same as the life cycles of plants and animals were connected to each other. It was a very big Life Lesson Plan. 

Through it all was your good cheer and natural modesty. Captive to kids, and raised in an era when the full potential of extraordinary women were given few outlets, you became a constant life learner who taught generations of children — including your own — how to fit together the dizzying parts of an ever-changing world. 

Truthfully, it’s been quite a life. The day after you got married you flew to Damascus, Syria and from there you saw and lived in Isfahan, Iran; Beirut, Lebanon; Salisbury, Rhodesia; Bamako, Mali; Tunis, Tunisia, Tangier, Morocco, and Algiers, Algeria. You visited (and dragged your ungrateful kids) to every major cathedral in Europe, motored up the Alps and through Norway and Sweden, took ferries from Spain to North Africa and from Libya to Sicily. You have been down the Amazon and up Machu Pichu, seen the Louvre in Paris and the first albino gorilla in Barcelona. You have been to Petra and Pompeii, the Calgary Stampede and the dripping forests of the Pacific Northwest. You studied Turkish rugs and taught yourself French, wore a jellaba to buy groceries from market women, and tried to make Christmas Trees for the kids in countries without Christmas Trees of any kind. Richard Halliburton was a piker compared to you! 

How you have managed to do it all and raise two kids and still laugh with ease is a model for the rest of us. I cannot imagine what diaper duty in Lebanon and Rhodesia was like, or how you managed to get us through chicken pox in Tunis, or the airport pretty much anywhere. I don’t think we were bad kids, but we were surely embarrassing, and no doubt loud, expensive, and inconvenient. I was trouble and terror from the start — a Caesarian section in Rhodesia in 1959. I apologize now and forever, and I know that was not the last of it. I have adult kids of my own now, and know the job never ends, thank God. 

There simply are not enough words to encompass all you have been to me. Above all, thank you for loving Carolyn and the kids and passing on all that is good to them as well. Your love and care has watered a lot of roots, not just my own. 

XXX OOO

Patrick

My mother died yesterday, 10 days before her 89th birthday.