….just thinking out loud really, about Mother’s Day. A week late.
I look at this picture of my mother and wonder who she was. Let’s say this was taken in her college years. She graduated in 1937 from Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, CT, a Catholic four year liberal arts college founded in 1925. What a thrill that must have been to have a Catholic college spring up so close to home. The O’Brien family certainly took to it! My mother was the first of three sisters to attend. Younger sisters Mary and Joan not only attended, but became Dominican nuns. They all commuted from their house on Orient St in Meriden.
I met her many years later, when she gave birth to me at age 32. I was baby number 5. She was glamorous and smart and probably a bit lonely.
I remember 32. Feels like ages ago. I was 50 when I decided to do a series of interviews with Mother. She was showing signs of dementia.
She would sit in the wing chair in the den, a little glass of white wine and a small bowl of popcorn, looking out at the trees blowing in the wind, remembering...tentatively, at first, those early days in Meriden when she was eight and her mother would cry if she didn’t get a letter from one of her brothers or sisters back in Cleveland, the dumbwaiter in the house her father found for them in Meriden after the transfer. The kitchen was in the basement. Her mother cried about that too. She remembered watching the church hall dances out the second story window of that house on Orient St. Mother was not a sentimentalist. At first, she thought it was silly to sit and reminisce, but the notion grew on her as she remembered the old GE refrigerator with the big round whirring motor sitting on top of it like a giant hat box, or the day their new neighbors in Meriden called her father outside to look at the smoke coming out of the chimney. “You may burn soft coal in Cleveland, but we don’t allow it here.”
Her father came inside and quickly ordered a load of Connecticut hard coal. Mother was astonished at all the stories still inside her head. With each wing chair chat, the past became clearer and more interesting than yesterday, memories flooding in a rush of distant nearness.
I remember thinking she was ancient at 82.
The older we get, the more the timeline boomerangs forward and backward,
we twist and turn, reaching towards the stars.
Thanks, Sheila! I recorded all those interviews. I’m a wacko! I should send this to other cuzzies. ❤️
Kate, this is the most wonderful blog of yours I’ve read. Would we call it a blog, with your art and spoken word seamlessly blended into the writing? You just get better and better. Every time I read about your Irish connections, I ache to be more Irish.