Confessions of the Ungrateful

Dear Mom,

Are you ready? This has been bothering me and I have to get it off my chest.

I’m talking about the underwire bra! It’s torturing me. There, that’s better.

Now, can we talk?

Boy, can we! And do we! Almost every week for the past ten years, we’ve run off our mouths in marathon conversations. Usually, I’m walking the dog. It’s nice having you in my ear as I meander the sidewalks and side streets of Portland pretending to exercise. Sometimes I hear you popping the clutch on the old recliner in Minneapolis. It’s nice to imagine you sitting back with a cup of coffee to gab.

We talk about everything. We talk about nothing. I could write a book called What We Talk About When We Talk About Nothing. It would be thick. And no one would care to read it. The minutia of our daily lives couldn’t be of interest to anybody but us.

To be honest, I’m not even sure it is always interesting to us.

But we talk through it.

Once, during one of our calls, I was blabbing away when you said you were stuck. I thought maybe the profound idea I’d been going on about left you absolutely gobsmacked, but no. Turned out, while I was talking you were half filling in the crossword puzzle in the Minneapolis Star Tribune and one of the clues stumped you. The clue was five spaces and something about “an early Smith punk.”

“Patti,” I said without hesitation.

You filled in the blanks and voila! Other clues suddenly made perfect sense.

I don’t think you’ve ever been more impressed by me.

In fairness, I don’t impress you much.

But you impress me. After producing two sons and a daughter, you might be forgiven for feeling a little blasé about the subsequent daughter and two sons that followed. I’m impressed you managed to feed eight people every single night. It was akin to throwing a nightly dinner party. A dinner party, I must add, for a slew of picky eaters with zero sense of gratitude and a penchant for spilling milk.

And crying over it.

And you didn’t complain. Much.

I get it. I can now see and appreciate all you did. The way you created our celebrations, baked the birthday cakes, filled and hid the Easter baskets, bought and decorated the Christmas tree helped shape a wildly different bunch of personalities into a loving family.

I have to confess, I should have recognized your talents years earlier.

I’m glad we both lived long enough for me to tell you as much during our phone calls.

Of course, our conversations are not simply nostalgic rehashes of the past. We talk about the now. And the future. I’ve learned a bit about aging bodies through our candid conversations. I confess, the reality of the breakdown of the corporeal being sometimes scares me. But I’m grateful we can talk about the inevitably of our deaths.

Not anytime soon, I hope.

For you, there is a life after death. You picture a heaven with angels and saints, where all the people who arrived at the pearly gates before you will be waiting to welcome you. It will be like a massive family reunion/block party without potato salad.

Sorry, I know you like potato salad. Maybe your heaven will have buckets of it. My own will not.

Sometimes I see evidence of the afterlife like clues in a crossword puzzle.

What I mean is, the answer is right there in front of my eyes but I don’t always recognize it.

Other times, I do.

My fifth grade teacher once assigned homework to write a paper about the rain cycle. In my “research” I discovered that water didn’t cease to exist during evaporation but simply changed into a form not visible to the human eye. It went up into the sky, condensed into clouds, and rained down again. Hit repeat forever. The idea that all matter, including this didn’t — couldn’t — cease to exist but continued blew my little ten-year-old mind. In absolute wonder, I wrote that the drinking fountain in the school hall might be squirting out the same water once used to baptize saints thousands of years ago.

Not to brag, but I got an A.

Okay, it probably helped that I was taught by nuns.

Still, the point was, and there was a point here somewhere, I think human matter and the energy that animates our beings will continue in some form.

In the future, I’ll feel overwhelmingly sad if I find myself walking around the streets of Portland under a drizzling rain in silence. But I’ll take comfort in the sense that we, like the rain, continue.

No offense, I’m still going to carry an umbrella.