It is easy enough to fall into a pensive mood on one’s birthday, especially when what lies ahead is measurably less, in terms of years, than what has already come before. Only moments ago I spoke with my mother, in what over the last few years has become increasingly a ritual of exchange where we dispense with the intricacies of accurate information and memory and rely instead on the one emotion she is able to cling to: I am her son, distant physically now, and for all of our lives separated by the thinnest thread of personality, the self striving to be other, the self always knowing there was an exquisite difference in our sameness, knowing in the end our differences would never matter more than the life she had given me or the love that I have for her –the rudiments of our conversation now rely on an act she has yet to forget. Today, she did not remember and I didn’t have the heart to remind her.
Personal histories are oddly familiar; so many can easily relate to the common sagas shared by the children and the children’s children of immigrants. I and my parents testify to the similarity of such stories, which if one were fortunate enough to listen to carefully, one might discover the richness of the tapestries our antecedents wove and the responsibility entrusted to us to preserve and augment that masterwork. But what if memory fails or our energy flags? What then? How long can only one view suffice to do justice to the grandeur of many eyes and lives and hearts and hands? It cannot if we do not share the precious moments of our lives fearlessly with those we love, and more certainly, with those we may not know or love.
On another day, in a different conversation she may remember what day has passed. When she does I am prepared, if she laments her forgetfulness, and she always does. I’ll tell her that I learned a new word, or rather that a word I knew had a definition I had never heard before. Natal: 1. of, relating to, or accompanying birth. 2. of or relating to the buttocks. She’ll laugh, even if I have to explain it to her –both our spirits will be lighter for it.
