Two decades of simply not forgetting
Mother’s Day this year may have come and gone but back when my late mother was still with us, I would joke her about the fact that with her birthday falling on the 19th of May, no sooner had Mother’s Day come around and we would be thinking about celebrating her birthday — and having to find gifts for two near consecutive occasions.
For us in the family, May was the month of Helen and there was no escape from that fact! My mom passed away July of 1996, so this year marks 20 years of that great absence in our lives. While I know that each person/family deals with that loss at one point or another, it doesn’t make it easier when I hear or read about some 80- or 90-year-old matriarch, or witness the celebratory mode that accompanies every annual Mother’s Day and get suffused with regret over losing my mom when she was just 62.
Time may heal all wounds, but for me, the “scab” that remains, even after two decades, is the constant reminder of how she is gone and how everything after that has been dimmed. The regrets are countless. My second son, Matteo, was born in 1994 and along with my third, Luca ( b. 1999), they don’t really have any memories of their Nonna Helen. I can show Teo a photo of my parents with all the grandchildren and my mom is holding a baby, Teo, but that is just a photo. This is in stark comparison to their older cousins who can reminisce about their times with Nonna and have anecdotes ready on hand to show the special bond my mom created with these grandchildren. My father passed away three years ago and so my boys all have vivid memories of him — laughter to tears stories of his eccentricities and OC nature.
My parents came from a generation where the father as paterfamilias would be the foundation of the family, playing his “I lead and you all follow” role. He might have been responsible for the structure or edifice that would constitute family life, but my mom was the “cement” that held it all together and always showed us unconditional, tough love. There isn’t a week that goes by where I don’t experience or see something, and am triggered by a memory of my mom or wondering how she would have liked, enjoyed or reacted to this or that thing. She had an almost subversive, naughty sense of humor and if there is something I clearly inherited from her, it would be that attitude or skewed perspective on life. She was the one encouraging me to write at a time when I was mired in the more conventional and traditional corporate world. She alone recognized that my love for the arts — novels, films and theater, could lead to something, even from a career perspective.
My nephew Dominic’s favorite “Tough Love” story would revolve around how, whenever there was something difficult he was enduring, even as basic as a treatment or medicine he would have to take, he would complain to my mom about how painful it was, she would always quip, “If it’s painful or hard, that must mean it’s working!” So yes, mom, it may be 20 years now, but it is still painful and hard accepting you are gone. But then, we take comfort in believing it means the love you showered on us is still working!
Summer reading gems
Here are three novels that astound for different reasons. In the case of
Arcadia, Pears whisks us to worlds that bend time, yet go beyond mere fantasy fiction. Higashino is one of the leading lights of Japanese crime fiction and Pavone gifts us with international intrigue and deception.
Arcadia by Iain Pears (available on Amazon.com) For anyone who has read An Instance of the Fingerpost, he or she would know how intricate, accomplished and satisfying the work of Pears can be. With his latest, Arcadia, take your pick — time travel, parallel universes or a created universe. Arcadia is all this and more. A Professor Lytten writes about a pastoral future that owes much to Tolkien and Lewis, so imagine his surprise as close friend Angela Meeson has constructed his Anteworld as a real universe one may enter. Couple this with corporate intrigue as at some point in the far future, as forces are being amassed to secure this “invention.” Plucky heroines, parallel characters inhabiting Meeson’s construct, 1960’s London, and this far future — all weave and intersect with intensity and delight as reading this novel becomes an unbridled joy.
The Travelers by Chris Pavone (available at Fully Booked) Will Rhodes, married to Chloe, writes for Travelers magazine and in the midst of a mid-life crisis, while at a French vineyard event finds himself flirting with Elle. When he meets her again in Argentina, the flirtation leads to something more consequential. Bad choices and dark secrets make up the running themes of this adventure thriller that satisfies on various levels. With deception a keyword running through the pages of this novel, we’re kept turning the pages to discover who is fooling who, and what is really going on! With the downward trend of publishing profitability, it seems the magazine is in fact a front for something much bigger and more sinister. Is Will a mere dupe, a pawn for dubious interests, or can he pluck himself from behind the “rock and a bad place?” Exciting read.
A Midsummer’s Equation by Keigo Higashino (available at Fully Booked) Author of the superb The Devotion of Suspect X and Malice, Higashino brings physicist Manabu Yukawa back in his latest. Set in a decaying ocean resort town near Tokyo, two strands of narrative emerge as we have on one hand, a big mining company intending to extract precious met als from the sea and causing a furor in the community and on the other hand, we have a retired police detective fou nd de a d on the seaside rocks seemingly f rom a suicide — but it turns out from carbon monoxide poison i ng, t hen dumped. The fact that Yukawa has been brought in as a resource speaker for the mining company guarantees that we’re in for a tale of deduction and detecting. As always, full, real characters, and engrossing local color share center stage. A great read!