One Moment in Time

My mom is pretty ill.  Cancer.  It’s what they say–fuck cancer and it’s a fucking terrible disease.  We are getting close to the end and I am thinking about a moment from last fall.

I was sitting in her apartment late one night, going through papers with her, and she brought out a box of old things I’d written and collected in college.  Some articles from the silly little college news, a few stories and papers I’d written, and a stray letter here and there.  

Side note: back in the 90s…we wrote.  E-mail was just getting going, zero Face Time, cells were the things in your body not the little computers in your front pocket…we wrote. Letters and letters and letters. Trying to find yourself, I guess.  Praying that someone else would bear that witness.  These long fucking things you’d come up with at two in the morning because that wasn’t even your bedtime–two or three stream of consciousness paragraphs dumped portside like tuning forks out into the middle of Long Island Sound, your head out the window to smoke a Camel down to the knuckles, time to do it again.

Anyhow, my mom watched me poking through the box.  I took some time with it.  And it was like pencilling through the ashes of some other life I’d burned to the ground before it ever crept past the first floor.

“This writing,” I said to her, “it’s like some other person I never became.  Like some other part of me that never made it out into the world.”

My mom was never really one for pep talks.  It just wasn’t her way in the world.

But I’ll never forget what she said to me that night.  Right in that moment.

“It’s never too late,” she said.  “I know you can do it.”

That was all the pep talk I ever wanted, I suppose.  So I took the box home with me, and here we are.

That’s my mom.  Still here.  So we beat on, to borrow a phrase.