A Fitting Memorial

A couple of days ago, Nate was going through a box of our family recipes when he happened upon Mom's recipe for chicken casserole. It's simple - chicken, rice, stuffing mix, cream of mushroom soup, so he went to the store and got the missing ingredients.

I'm having it for dinner as I type this. Nate's a pretty decent cook, and he's done the recipe justice. We were talking about that just now, when he asked if I remembered what day it is. Mom died two years ago today. I think it would warm her heart to know we're eating her casserole today. It warms mine.

Pictures of Mom, Part 2

This one dates from about 1982. Coincidentally, Mom is now (in the photo) about the same age as Granny in the previous photo (and I was ten or thereabouts, too). She's sitting at the teeny table in Granny's kitchen. You can see that infamous hostility towards the photographer. I'd like to think I look half so evil when someone rubs me the wrong way.

I never thought of it this way before, but Mom could have used a little pressed powder. Her face is too shiny. If anyone reading this thinks I'm being too harsh on my late mother, the first time she saw a photo of me en femme, she told me my lipstick was too red. And I was wearing a berry shade!

Anyway, Mom is often in my thoughts. Much of the time I see her as she was at the end. It's nice to refresh my memories of happier times.

Pictures of Mom, Part 1

I was sorting through some things this morning when I found a couple of photos I thought I'd lost forever. When Mom died two years ago, there was a mad scramble amongst my cousins and other relatives to divvy up the family photo albums. Dad kept a few that had pictures of their wedding and early married life. In with some things I wasn't interested in, I found a couple of Mom.

Photos of Mom are rare, because she didn't like being photographed. She treated anyone (even relatives) with cameras like celebs treat the paparazzi. I lost an entire box of photos during my move from Charlotte to Virginia. Thus I only have a few I took in the months before she died, and these two from out of the family trove.

This photo is from April of 1959. Mom was a couple of months shy of her tenth birthday. Her mother, my Granny, stands behind her. (It's hard to think of anyone so young and vital as "Granny" isn't it?). Mom was a cute little girl, wasn't she?

The Day The World Went Away

I'd listen to the words he'd say
but in his voice I heard decay
the plastic face forced to betray
all the insides left cold and gray
there is a place that still remains
it eats the fear it eats the pain
the sweetest price he'll have to pay
the day the whole world went away

That would be November 4, 2007. The day my mother died. On this Mother's Day, I find myself missing the love of my mother as much as I did the day she died. We weren't always as close as we ought to've been, but I like to think that our last couple of years made up for the spaces inbetween.

The song above comes from the 1999 Nine Inch Nails album The Fragile. Trent Reznor apparently was apparently inspired to write it by the death of his grandmother. I heard a remix of it a couple of weeks ago in the long trailer for the upcoming movie Terminator: Salvation. I never thought about it this way before, but the "Terminator" series is something that has followed me from my pre-teen years into adulthood. I've never conceived of any parallel between myself and John Connor, but it's hard not to see one now.

If this struggle of ours is a war, I am merely a foot soldier in it, not a leader by any means. Yet I feel like my mother prepared me for it, the best way she knew how. At the end, Mom told me that she was proud of me, that she loved me. She said that in spite of things, or maybe because of them, I had turned out okay.

Today is Mothers' Day. It's supposed to be a celebration of mothers and motherhood, and here I am slogging through a weird, morbid metaphor about a movie with killer robots. Hey, I've got to write what I know.