Like landmines, the stories seem to come out of nowhere and everywhere and without warning.  I was like a puppy, hoping for a table scrap.  I sat waiting for a story about my mother.

 

•  “Your mother, loved to rub a piece of satin under her nose,” my Aunt Penny told me, one uneventful day when I was fifteen.

  

Once when my father and I were driving over a bridge, and we drove over the part of the road that makes a vibrating noise,

 

• “you’re mother hated that sound.” 

 

one day my Aunt  said: 

 

• “your mother loved vinegar pickles and tuna fish sandwiches,”

 

and retold a story about seeing her a friend falling in front of my mother and my mother:

 

• “she also laughed when someone hurt themselves.” 

 

My older cousins, my father’s nieces,

 

remember my mother as:

 

• being beautiful. 

 

My Uncle Frank, remembers my mother from junior high school,

 

• "your mother was a beauty."  

 

My father always told.

 

• "I loved your mother so much."

•  

and

 

• "she was so beautiful."

 

and

 

• "You look just like her." 

•  

There is a phenomenon that occurs when someone dies young; they are always remembered as perfect. Apparently at the time of death they obtain sainthood. 

 

I never learned anything of substance about her.  She became cardboard, like a bad biography, nothing that made her seem human. 

 

I wanted to know her; the good, the bad and the ugly.

 

 A calamity, here’s one:

 

• “Once, I woke up and your mother tied little bows all over my pubic hair.”