Mum and Magoo (My Christmas Reading 2025)

 

"Until death it is all life."

When I was younger I made a practice of kissing great men. I don't mean I ever had sex with anyone famous. Never did. Might have done if it had been on offer but it never was so, alas, nothing very saucy for the memoirs. Sorry. I wouldn't call the kisses innocent either as I was young and rather brassy, but nothing really came of them in that way and my motives were, I suppose we could say, pure. (Allen Ginsberg kissed me once and that was not at all innocent or expected and he had a chest cold at the time and it was not pleasant, but that's a story for another time.)

Walking back to my friend's apartment after the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation -- that was the full title, the alphabet was less inclusive in those days -- I saw an old man on the sidewalk ahead of me. He was in a small group of friends. I was with a different group. I was pretty sure I knew who the old man was and so I ran up to him and asked if he was, in fact, Harry Hay. He was. I asked if I could kiss him. He said yes and so I did. We hugged and he smiled and waved as I returned to my somewhat aghast young friends. Now for any who don't know, Harry Hay was a great gay activist, a founder of both one of the first gay rights organization in the United States, The Mattachine Society, and The Radical Faeries. He was an actor, a communist, a labor organizer, and is widely consider the father of the modern LGBTQIA+ movement. I'd read his biography, studied his work, and always remembered his explanation that the secret history of gay people was "a history of kisses." I kissed Harry Hay. He had kissed this one and that one and someone who had kissed Lord Alfred Douglas and so though Harry's kiss I had a direct connection to my hero Oscar Wilde. See how it works? Further, though most of our history has been hidden and intentionally destroyed, by this same chain of kisses we are connected in a direct line of affection back and back to Socrates, to "the apostle beloved of Jesus," to Achilles, Alexander, Gilgamesh. I think it is a beautiful idea. And so I kissed Harry Hay when he was eighty-one and I was twenty-nine and  I am proud to speak my lineage of kisses.

That idea has influence my whole life, that theory of connection that links me to Edward Carpenter, connects me to E. M. Forster, to Auden, to Truman Capote and on. Humans have evolved by and for connection, it is how we survived and why we've got our lovely, big, often neglected brains. "Just connect." 

It has also shaped how I see my reading life and provided a way to understand the connection of this book to these, this author to that, to me. I can't justify calling this anything so grand as a theory, it's more an entertainment, a game, but it does offer interesting and sometimes unexpected glimpses into my past. One book led to the next, and the next and if I could remember all the connections there would be a kind of autobiography in it, not so much of kisses now but concepts, ideas, art. I have writers in my library of whom I speak as "my household Gods," some going straight back to childhood like L. Frank Baum, and Mark Twain, and Charles Dickens, and some who came later and by other ways like Dr. Samuel Johnson, and dear Charles Lamb, and Edmund White who we just lost this year. I sometimes try to track back through my books to find my first meeting with Dumas or Miss Maria Edgeworth or this year's Nobel winner for Literature, Lazlo Krasznahorkai. 

There is one book I know exactly when we met. 

I recently had a boy in the bookstore, college boy with whom I had a brief conversation in which I mentioned my favorite translation of Don Quixote (it's the current Penguin edition, translated by John Rutherford because I think it the funniest.) The boy was taken back a bit by that word, "favorite" and asked how many translations I could possibly have read. Five sounds very very impressive but I was quick to amend this by saying "whole or in part" which is all too true of the way I read now anyway. No apologies. Life is short. 

Anyone remember Mr. Magoo? If you don't, Quincy Magoo was a nearsighted, elderly gentleman who bumbled through a series of short subject and feature length animation and even appeared in a whole series of literary adaptations that ran and reran as primetime television specials  in my childhood. Most famously, he starred in a version of Dickens' A Christmas Carol that still plays somewhere every December. I loved those shows and one adaptation in particular was, I now realize, my very first encounter with Don Quixote.

And so, age probably nine or ten, I made my way to Grove City Public Library to find and read this book where, spoiler alert, Mr. Magoo dies at the end. In order to understand this part of the story, you need to know that I did not grow up in town but four miles down the road in an unincorporated village not covered at the time by any agreement with the town library. So, in order for me to check out books, we would either have had to pay a fee or I had to pretend that my home address was actually my grandmother's house in town. That's what I did. Always felt like shaky ethical ground at the time but then I was a nervous, already quite class-conscious child, as little queer country boys must inevitably be in the surprisingly stratified society of small American towns. 

I walked to the library after school, found the book in the adult stacks and sat and looked at the Gustave Dore illustrations until it was time for my mother to come pick me up on her way home from work. At the time she was cleaning dormitories at Slippery Rock College. It was filthy work for low wages done for ungrateful, often rude kids who thought nothing of leaving chicken bones under their beds and condoms on the floor. She needed the job though because we needed the money. Both my parents worked at the time at jobs they did not love so that their children might have more comfortable lives; plenty to eat, clean clothes, a bit of pride.

When I took the big book to the counter and gave the volunteer librarian my card she seemed not best pleased. She scrutinized the book, and my card, and me and then asked where I'd found it. It was not the first book I'd taken out from the adult section, but for the first time I was told I could not have this one, that it was not "appropriate" at my age. It was made very clear that I had done something wrong, that the book was adult not only because it came from those shelves but because, I was pretty sure, the librarian thought it was dirty and that I wanted it for that reason. I blushed to the roots of my hair, retrieved my library card and fled outside to the steps here I had to stay and wait for my mother to fetch me.

Eventually she did, pulling up in yet another car inappropriate to a respectable married cleaning lady; some slightly sporty old wreck my father was probably fixing up in order to sell it in the yard. My mother drove many such cars. I can still see her bucket and brushes and gloves on the console between the bucket seats. Doubtlessly she was exhausted after a long shift and glad to be headed home. She noticed pretty quickly that I was uncharacteristically quiet. She asked what I got at the library and when I whispered, "nothing," she knew something was wrong. She asked me what and when I wouldn't say, she pulled over and parked and asked again. It was then, in tears that I explained about Mr. Magoo and Don Quixote and the Adult Section of the library. I will say bluntly that I don't know that either of my parents ever felt the need of a library. It was as I've said a small town and thus a small library and one can't spend every hour of childhood reading the same Lives of the Great Inventors or In Washington's Youth or any of the like dusty children's volumes otherwise intended for boys my age. Sooner or later, sooner in my case, one has to head out for fresh pasture.

Another thing about small towns? Everybody pretty much knows everybody.

I don't know what my mother made of my muddled telling of having been refused a book, but something in the way of it being done struck a nerve and so before I understood what was happening she had turned the car around and we were back in town and back at the library. I wanted to crawl through the floorboards and disappear. When my mother got out of the car and told me to come with her I was contemplating faking a heart attack or running away from home, anything to avoid the humiliation of going back inside and or being confronted about my status as an illegitimate user of the institution. I was sure we would be jailed for fraud at least. And yet I was a good, well brought up little puss and so in she went and after her I followed, eyes cast down to the creaking wooden floor. 

Everybody knows everybody, remember? So even though I don't know that my Mum had ever set foot in that library before, up to the counter we went and she greeted the librarian by name and the librarian returned the greeting.

And then my mother, my shy, tired, unkempt mother wearing a snap-front apron and a headscarf tied in a knot asked to see the book I was trying to check out. It was still on the desk. My mother looked at it and asked the librarian why I couldn't have it.  The librarian explained in low tones what the objection was. I couldn't quite hear over the blood roaring in my head, but I did hear the word "prostitution" at one point and the suggestion that I was too little to understand the book anyway. The librarian addressed my mother familiarly as "Stella," not "Mrs. Craft" as she might have done with a regular patron or fellow church-goer. I suspect that pissed Stella off too. Whatever was said, I remember my mother putting one chubby fist against the bone of her hip -- never a good sign -- and then, calling the librarian by her full married name, telling her roughly the following:

"You know who I am. You know where we live. You don't have to let my kid take out books at all if you don't want him to. He has for years now and he always treats the books respectfully and he's never late bringing them back, is he? No. And you know he can read already better than most and already reads beyond his grade and that, so I'm going to tell you what: like I say, you know who I am and you know he's my son and I'm telling you right now he can read any goddamned book he wants as far as I'm concerned and it is not your place to tell him he can't and if you tell me I'm wrong we will go and we'll have to just figure out how to get him what he wants somewhere else, but what he reads is not now and never will be up to you. Am I understood? Now, either give him the book or don't. I have to get home and start supper."

And I went home with my first Don Quixote.

What I was actually able to make of a thousand page novel originally published in Spanish in 1615, I couldn't tell you now. Probably not all that much. I can tell you that it was the first book I studied on my own as close as a Bible. I can tell you that I made sure that I stopped frequently to understand the English (it was probably either the Smollett or Ormsby translation.) I confess I do not think I finished it despite checking it back out twice. In fact I don't think I read it straight through until I read the Samuel Putnam translation -- still good! -- in my early thirties, or roughly the time I was still kissing great gays, just to come full circle.

And so our heroes can be, among other things, long dead, fictional, foolish, kissed, forgotten, but always and sometimes unexpectedly brave. That's the whole point of them. The great critic and essayist Simon Leys in a lovely essay titled Quixotism says this lovely thing:

"When Don Quixote lay dying, sadly cured of his splendid illusion, ultimately divested of his dream, Sancho found he had inherited his master's faith; he had acquired it simply as one would catch a disease -- through the contagion of fidelity and love.

Because he converted Sancho, Don Quixote will never die."

Isn't that lovely? 

As Ive mentioned before, my mother died earlier this year. She was ninety three years old. If I owe my survival and my sense of hard-won self-worth to Harry Hay and all the old queers who came before and fought so that I might live aloud, if I can trace my love of serious literature to that first, forbidden book and count among my first teachers Miguel Cervantes, a busted, broken old veteran and 16th Century hack who in late middle age wrote one of the humane masterpieces of fiction, then I must close with a word of thanks to Stella Cookson Craft, my shy, brave, feisty, fierce little mother. She gave me life, her unconditional love, and my best example of what it means to stand up when needs be. In closing then, I stand as she taught me to, and thank you all for coming.

What there is of

 My mother's house is dark and quiet. The roof of her house is shaded by the trees my father planted fifty years ago. Even in broad day unless you are at a window the room is likely dim. This suits Mum, mostly. She has a sensitivity to light and has learned, it seems, to see in the dark. My brother calls her, "Owl Lady." She turns on the standing lamp to read her paper and her mail. (She also drapes a kerchief over her bosom so as not to get inky from the cheap newsprint.) She balances her checkbook and such on the kitchen table, in her add-on laundry room. Sunniest room in the house. Always smells good too, like fresh towels and clean sheets. At ninety one she doesn't iron everything anymore but the board's right there if she needs it. The quiet in her house was always there, but we never used to hear it. My folks were never people to run a tv or leave the radio on all day. Busy mostly. Things to do. He worked, she worked, they raised children, they went, they did, they were doing every day. There were always other people to be looked after; old people, other people's kids, strangers, friends, and animals to be seen to, and places they had to be or meant to go. Once a week they went out to eat. Every Friday. Usually had fish. Used to order black coffee, then water with lemon. Then that stopped.

The quiet settled on the house for good when my father died.  

Now widowed, my mother must occupy her own time as best she can. She paints a little. She collages. A week or so ago she "put out Christmas" which means that her little house is now decorated to within an inch of inaccessibility. (If you should go to visit, mind how you go as there will be very few flat surfaces that have not been made abundantly festive. Even without the holiday displays the house is well packed. I joke with her that there is nowhere to fall all the way to the floor.) 

Every day now my mother gets up and makes her breakfast now rather than his. Instead of sorting pills into two little porcelain dishes, she puts her pills into just the one dish the night before. She takes the insulin he gave her for many, many years. She eats her toast, drinks her coffee, and watches the morning's local news (her choices are Pittsburgh or Youngstown, neither of which is actually all that local -- which says something about life in rural America.) Even in her nineties and alone she dresses every day and "puts on her face." She is not to be caught out in her pajamas should anyone come to the door -- so long as no one comes at some unreasonable hour before noon.

And now an assertion I believe I will be allowed as soon as it's made with or without concrete evidence. 

I know I am biased, nonetheless I genuinely believe that my mother is now an entirely admirable person. Which is not to say that she used to be a bank-robber or someone who kicked babies. (And now I feel I've rather painted myself into a corner and so I ought to say, no, we neither of us kick babies, dogs, or other people potted geraniums -- and what a dark and dire world in which you must live if anything I've said led you to think we did. But then my fault as I'm the one who may very well have just put that idea in your head. Apologies.) To re-state the obvious, my mother was always a good person and a good mother. I intend only to add that what there is of her now; what is left after illness, loss, survival, resignation, loneliness, love, she now seems to me to be just the essential of what she has always been. My mother has been winnowed but has neither bent nor broken. 

Doesn't make her a saint, mind. She still gets irritable, still worries like old bones things she ought not to worry at all, still gets blue, and still snaps now and again. She can still wither your soul with a surprisingly sharp, "Not really" in answer to what may have seemed a perfectly innocent question. There are times now talking to her on the phone when I still can find myself no longer entirely adult. Happens. Say the wrong thing the wrong way and I'm nine. She's still Mum. We both try very hard now not to disappoint, though I know I regularly do, as I always have and inevitably will again, though she'd deny it. We usually laugh quite a lot when we talk, but not always in the nicest way, or at the most harmless things.  We can be a bit catty the two of us. We giggle when she's not altogether nice, particularly when she's seen some nasty piece of work at the Walmart or spoken to some mean biddy at the market. Love that. A phrase from my grandmother comes to mind, "piss and vinegar," and yeah, she's sweet, my Mum, but that's still in the mix as well.

For example we both find it funny that when the irascible, the unpleasant, and the mean, the miserable, the stingy, and the gawd-awful-genuinely-bad people die -- and it's never soon enough, is it? -- and before you can say "good riddance" they are instantly beatified by their survivors. Go to any funeral, read any obituary. Doesn't matter that you know better. That wretched woman who used to wallop her kids in the Kmart? Dead? Best. Mother. Ever. Deadbeat Dad? Dead? A Faultless Father. That grandmother you remember shouting racist nonsense at the common-room tv now Sits At the Right Hand of a Loving God. When the teacher who tortured us in Algebra class died she became a "devoted educator." That brute who beat the tar out of anyone in arm's reach, he dies and we are shocked to learn that he was in fact, "a gentle giant" who "loved the Lord." Did he now?  It's hilarious. Dark, but funny. We have both, my mother and I, known enough old people to know that old age, in mother's words, just makes one "more so." Whatever you were at forty, sixty to eighty won't fix. "Nobody stops being a jerk," she's told me more than once, "just because they've slowed down." (Only she didn't say "jerk." P&V, remember? When she wants to, that dainty little thing curses like a pirate's parrot.) Neither of my beloved grandmothers was ever less than a handful when they got old. She took good care of both of them by the way. Nobody ever called either an angel, even at their funerals -- and we really loved both of those bossy old ladies, honest. (And no, we didn't always say "bossy.")

As for Mum, it is not to say that she cannot still worry a thing to tatters when she is of a mind, or that she can't be suspicious, short-tempered, or sharp. But remember what she said about getting old? What she is and has always tried hardest to be is kind and at the very the least never intentionally unkind. She loves who she loves, good and bad, and that's not easily undone, try as anyone might. To be happy is what she intends for us all. To be kind was however very much more to the point. That's what she taught us. Can't control happiness. Can always be kind. And I try. Mostly. Still.

She has always been stronger than she looks, in party because she's always been well over four feet tall and usually quiet. When she was younger she was rather unkindly dubbed, presumably by one of the crazy sisters, "Stella the Stone," for her personal stoicism. That hurt her feelings I know, obviously disproving the premise right there, though she only told me so years later. Nevertheless, when we were kids it did seem to us that she could and would decide when she would and would not be moved to reaction, unlike my father who raged and wept with equal abandon nearly all his life. Did not want to ride alone with him in a car after you'd misbehaved. That was bad. He was also always the first person to sooth an injury, but there was something distinctly masculine about his public access to emotion. (Still true generally, my fellow men. Ponder that.) My Mum was taught to be a woman of the Eleanor Roosevelt type; if you're going to cry, go to bathroom, lock the door, and turn on the tap so no one can hear you. Probably why she seemed the least sentimental of all the adults in my childhood: always present and practical of necessity, the one to be counted on in any crisis, the one who invariably got the call to help, the one least likely to lose her shit no matter what. She did of course, lose it, but my father lost his with predictable regularity, as did both of their sainted mothers, his especially, whenever the wind blew the wrong way or the mood came upon. I've inherited some of that temper too. Has to be fought. There were also a lot of demonstrably mad people in my mother's life at one time, including both her sisters, and sincerity could sound harsh when it had to be put so often to practical effect; when someone had to be committed or made to see a surgeon and so on. (I've some experience of this now myself and it is frankly impossible. No idea how she managed.) She could love you and make you listen, check yourself in for observation, clean up the mess you'd made, settle what needed putting down. My father it was who obviously felt bad and sympathized. Mum it was who told him "do something or I will," and did. They were a good team. They took good care. (Just as my brother and sister-in-law take care of her now.)

Stones of course wear away in the stream and nearly all of my mother's edges have been rounded. She can still make you watch your step now and again, but as I've said, mostly what we do together now is talk and laugh and pass the time whenever I can find the time to do so. She is still funny, self-deprecating, and occasionally forgetful. Still forgiving always but only so far. She remembers some grudges better than what she had for lunch or when we last talked. Still bright as a penny though. And sharp as a tack. All those. She also stubbornly resists being made harmless. She now suffers fools better than she used to, but she is no more fond of them than she ever was. She is also now shameless when it comes to reminding anyone who needs to hear it that at ninety-one she doesn't have time to listen to any nonsense she finds unsupportable, though she is still more tolerant of other people's nonsense than I am likely ever to be. And she freakin' loves that nobody believes she's ninety-one from the look and sound of her. Loves it. She looks great. She's always been cute, always stylish, but new drugs made her lose quite a lot of weight and now she's slim as a girl again. She wishes my Dad had lived to see her so little. She's 'bout as big as a sparrow now.

That makes her adorable, though that's not what I'm on about.

What makes me particularly proud of her just now, what's set me bragging that my Mum is better than she ever was has all to do with her pickin' fights and saying "NO" real loud. Just lately she's made a renewed commitment to a rather gentler, elderly version of kicking' ass and takin' names. Seriously. Stella the Stone is now rather her wrestling name. Immovability her super-power. Will not be budged, this one. Because it seems some bad guys decided to do a bad thing and she was not having it. Not going to have that nonsense. Oh hell, to be honest she called it bullshit and the lady was not wrong.

When I say my mother reads the local newspapers I mean all of it, every inch. Some corporation puts an itty bitty notice the size of a stick of gum in there somewhere on a back classifieds page (they still have those in small town newspapers, the classifieds, which is why there are still some small town newspapers) and this little squib is the only notice of a public meeting, trust me when I tell you, she's reading that. The meeting turns out to be with her Township Supervisors. Soon. Also turns out the corporation is ramming through a new industrial gravel pit just up the road, a gravel pit that threatens to ruin local property-values, wreck the water-table, despoil the air with noise and dust and dirt, bring a a fleet of noisy, road-wrecking trucks up and down the road, and probably make a couple of greedy bastards richer at the expense of everyone else who lives there.

Well, my brother, who reads the paper after her but just as close agrees and the two of them go to that meeting. It is infuriating as all three supervisors insist that their responsibility is to remain "neutral" which is obviously "nonsense" again. The representative from the corporation turns his back on the public and refuses to talk to them. The supervisors do nothing. Everybody goes home mad.

My mother calls both local papers and the nearest news stations trying to get someone interested in this story but no one writes or says a thing. She even plays the "I'm ninety-one" angle -- human interest, see? --  but for once it does no good.

My mother and brother put signs in their yards and tell their neighbors to go to the next meeting. There are people actually organizing the resistance to this insanity, the same brave people who've kept out a "garbage mountain" for years. Next meeting there are more locals. The company lawyer has bodyguards to keep the rednecks from beating him up in the parking lot. My brother notices that those boys are packing heat and they get put out or have to turn in the guns, I forget which, but that had to be good moment. One of the neighbor's has hired his own lawyer now.

Another meeting and some of the local merchants have finally heard about this ugly business and they show up and kick. Now the place is pretty full. Lots of folks get up and raise polite midwestern Hell. Nobody fights the lawyer or his bodyguards. (Everybody but the lawyer finds those boys hilarious.) The tide would seem to have turned. Finally after hours my mother decides to speak. This is not something she has ever done, public speaking. Not her at all. But she does it.

They tell her she needs to walk down front but she tells them straight up: she's ninety one years old and she's been sitting there too long and so that is not going to happen and they can just bring her the microphone and she talk right where she is. People smile and laugh. 

By the time I hear this story she can't remember a damn thing she said. A week nor so later we piece it together from my brother and other sources, plus now it's over she remembers it better. She told those officials and the rest that she was a nice town girl when her new husband moved her out to the middle of nowhere. Just the one corner store then, one gas pump, and fields. Sixty five years she's lived there and she has watched a whole community grow there: families and new businesses and good neighbors. And now they were going to throw all of that away so some greedy men could come in and ruin the land and spoil the air. It was not, is not right. She told them, in her quiet way, no.

And then the corporation quit. They insisted in the paper that it was nothing to do with the locals. But the bastards quit. No gravel pit. The good won.

I'm not saying she did this. Collective action, resistance, and a functioning democracy did this, but even my elderly, adorable little mother knew it doesn't happen unless you show up. And she showed up. 

That's what I'm talking about. She always shows up. So long as there's breath in her, she will show up. That's the lesson.

And that's my best gift this year. I'm pretty sure everybody's scheming to get me some new overalls that fit better than the ones I bought myself and that's fine. I will still be surprised. But honestly, my mother's gift to me I happily now share with you. She used to make fudge this time of year and give it to everybody. She made excellent fudge. She'd send some to me in a tin the size of a suitcase, and I shared some of it too because she has never understood portion control or discreet servings. And now she's given me another example I will try to follow and will try to persuade you all to follow too.

Show up. Resist the bullies. Save what is good. Find your voice and raise it when you have to. Make our democracy work. Be kind.

Her name by the way is still Mrs. Gerald Craft, and I call her Mum, or course but you can call her Stella or Mrs. Craft when you meet her and she'd be glad of the company, or you can find her on "the Spacebook" and tell her you're proud of her too, if you are so moved. Feel free to remark that she can't possibly be ninety-one and look that good! That won't do a bit of harm either because it's true. Say Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays or Happy Chanuka as you choose because I'm pleased to say she not one of those assholes either, as she'd be the first to tell you in just those words and then we can all have a giggle because it really is awfully cute when she curses. 

What there is of her now? It's all good.

The Beloved Old Goat

 

"They that enter into the world are too often treated with unreasonable rigour by those that were once as ignorant and heady as themselves; and distinction is not always made between the faults which require speedy and violent eradication, and those that will gradually drop away in the progression of life. Vicious solicitations of appetite, if not checked, will grow more importunate; and mean arts of profit or ambition will gather strength in the mind, if they are not early suppressed. But mistaken notions of superiority, desires of useless show, pride of little accomplishments, and all the train of vanity, will be brushed away by the wing of Time."

-- Samuel 4Johnson: Idler #25 (October 7, 1758)

She was kind to me, to us, even when she probably shouldn't have been, certainly when kindness was more than we deserved. She was the mother of my friend and as such just one more I might have meant to charm. I was good with mothers when I was young, fathers not so much, my own or others'.  Mothers liked me, always did. Most of them loved me sooner or later. Some of them I came to love back, but not all. One or two never liked me much despite my best efforts. Disappointing but understandable really as I was having sex with their sons. They must have suspected this even if they didn't know. I was obviously an influence at the very least, and not always for good. Her daughter was my best friend, never a lover, so that is why it probably mattered more. She was kind to me, the mother of my best friend then, to all of us, and so I have loved her ever since.

Forgive me for not using their names. It was only a day ago, at 2:12 in the morning that my friend's mother died. And yes, she died of what you'd assume given the times, and you're right to think that she needn't have if people weren't so selfish and stupid but we are. We do not listen and some of us think we know better when we don't and so people keep dying. It's horrible and infuriating and the woman who's died would not have disagreed I think but she isn't here to say so and it isn't my place to speak for her even now she's dead. It isn't my place to announce her death either.

Please forgive me then for writing in this awkward way-- without names -- about my friend's mother. Those who knew her will recognize her in this, I hope, but I speak here only for myself.

 When I was young I believed that the mothers of my friends liked me because I wanted them to, and more, because I needed them. It wasn't that I didn't or don't have a mother of my own, and a good one too, in whom I am lucky. Wasn't why. From a very early age I preferred the company of women, saw more of them and admired them more than men. Men were fascinating, but more as a matter of reverence or study. Men confused me. Still do, often as not, and I've been one and lived with another now for a very long time. Women were more interesting, had better conversation, better manners, and paid me more attention. I liked that. Women did more of the things in which I was interested and they ran most of the things in which I came to be involved; whether it was church or theater or politics, education, books, gossip, art -- it was women who could help me. It was women I could make laugh without malice. All the women I knew when I was a child, the women who weren't related to me, and who weren't my teachers, were either the friends of my parents or grandparents or the mothers and grandmothers of my friends. Children are selfish creatures and are meant to be I should think. I certainly was. If I needed something as a child, I learned quickly if not from birth that it was better to ask a woman, they may even have taught us that now I think of it. Lost? Ask a policeman -- or a lady -- for help. So I did, and they do, still.

Mothers liked me because I was helpful just as I'd been taught to be and polite. I was clean and well spoken and my people, if not well off, were nice. This may matter more in a small town where everyone pretends to know everyone else, or at least everyone else's business. It may still. I was not altogether unsupervised or wild. Working mothers like my own didn't much like it when we ate up all their food before they got home, but other than that they didn't mind us much so long as we weren't too noisy and later they hoped we weren't getting drunk or too high. When I met really middle class people in their very nice homes with very nice furniture on which one did not sit and with more forks than were needed on their very nice dining tables, I did not embarrass myself too much or presume too much on their civility. I didn't goggle when the mothers of my new middle class friends drank cocktails at lunch or when middle class fathers got drunk over dinner and flirted with the girlfriends of their sons. I admit I found them all quite fascinating, like characters in a book, which my middle class friends found mystifying I'm sure. (They, I remember were generally astonished at how much my mother tried to feed them at a sitting, that my father gave me money without being asked when we went out, and that no one in my family seemed very interested in where my friends intended to go to college or what my friends intended to do for a living when they grew up.)

My best friend's mother was different from all of these other women, or so at least she seemed to me at the time. She was a single mother, a divorcee at a time when that word was still exotic in the place where I grew up. She was a beautiful woman, always in some ways younger than her years, with stylishly short hair and simple make-up, a trim figure and tasteful business clothes. She supported herself and her only child without help from her ex-husband who I never met and wouldn't want to and her home was modest but modern and chic. All of the women I admired were smart and most of them were kind but she was tested in ways that most of them weren't, and not just by her daughter's strange little friends, and she seemed to me even when we'd made her most angry, entirely admirable. I don't know that we ever made a joke at her expense, any of us ever. Imagine that.

It would be years before any of us ever called her by her first name or anything other than "_____'s Mom" even to her face which quickly became something of a permanent endearment even after her daughter's friends were all grown. (The last time I had a meal with her I had to make myself use her Christian name, even then, all these years later.) Her daughter would occasionally and jokingly address her as, "old goat," as in, "hey, you old goat, we're home," but the joke was only funny because it was so obviously ridiculous. The very last person to be described as such, even when she did in fact grow old. She always laughed at this -- I think -- and we certainly did. She was frankly too glamorous to me, and too sophisticated in my eyes to take anything we said to shock her entirely seriously. (Perhaps she should have, as some of the things we told on ourselves were true.) When we were grown and kept only in imperfect touch, my friend and I used "The Old Goat" as a kind of shorthand for asking or telling after this woman we both loved.

I did love her, and always will. She was genuinely funny, in her own sometimes acerbic way and more often than not in her willingness to play along in almost any silly thing we played at; childish noises, mock fights, outlandish stories told on each other. Constant companions in high school and into college and even now on the very rare occasions when we communicate, my friend and I are still very silly with each other. Grimmest tragedy, which we've both known, she more than I, failures and disappointments, romances gone awry, deaths, addictions, loss, we've never not been able to talk about these things eventually and we still always come back at some point to the awkward goofs we were as adolescents. We find it strangely reassuring. My friend has always been a bit butch, even when she did her hair properly or wouldn't go to school. I've always been rather... theatrical. We always made each other laugh. Her mother must have found us quite alarming. We gave her cause. Still, at least in retrospect she was always willing to laugh along with us, despite our appalling behavior separately and together and with our weird need to be boorish with each other and joy in embarrassing ourselves, in public and private. We behave like fools, my friend and I, because each recognized in the other something of the same foolishness and to make it all if not better, then bearable; anecdote as antidote. Let's tell that terrible story again! At least "_____'s Mom" will laugh. It's always worked for us, if not always for her, poor woman.

 I sought tolerance and found it from more than I'd been led to expect. Got a little older and I sometimes succeeded in bullying or shaming into silence some of the people I could not convince or charm. But my friend's mother was different in so many ways from most of the women I then knew, and in this most particularly. When she loved someone, as I believe she loved me, it was unconditional and considered and sincere. I was not unloved otherwise, but I at least had the sense to recognize what love looked like as it was given to me and I hope I was grateful.

Of all the women I've ever wanted to make laugh, none was a better audience than "_____'s Mom" from the day I first met her to this. She was a smoker back in the day when that could still be elegant and between the two of us, however bad we'd been or however late I'd shamelessly waited to be driven home, etc., the common goal was to make that woman laugh until she couldn't breath. She would laugh until she cried and swatted us away. She would laugh until she told me I had to leave -- and when would I see her again? She laughed at herself and her own bad choices and she laughed even when I know we broke her heart. Later I suspect she laughed less. A second marriage. Jobs at which she was better than she needed to be. Widowhood. Loneliness. Illness and frailty, disappointment and pride, worry and wandering, and yet she laughed when I saw her, even when we cried for cause and not from laughing. 

I've always thought that phrase, "indomitable spirit" absurd, and not just because it is usually deployed by persons looking to benefit by standing next to rather than in the shoes of the person thus described. It's a verbal decoration, like pinning a medal over a wound and then moving on down the ward. "Aren't you brave. Where next?" Besides, it simply isn't true. There is no spirit which mayn't flag, no one who might not be beaten if by nothing less than time and death. I know nothing of eternity, but something now of this life, if less than I ever thought would be possible at my present age. What I know now is that spirits can be broken and can mend. That is our salvation and our hope. I have seen it. My friend and her beloved mother are among those who have shown me the possibility of this even in their darkest days, together and separately they have come back from places I would be too terrified to even visit. I do not say that either was "indomitable." Buffeted and bruised, certainly, dominated, even broken, but always they've come back and together we have somehow always still laughed.

My best friend's mother was kind to me when I was unhelpful and lied, when I was took advantage of her generosity and abused her hospitality, when the whole unhappy gang of her only daughter's only queer misbegotten friends broke her lamps and spoiled her rugs, disappointed her and failed to protect her child. She was kind to me when I had no right to further kindness, when I was really no friend to her daughter just as when I was. I learned very early that I might ask of her anything in her power to help me and that is a rare thing to know of someone else's mother. She was kind to me because she was kind. She liked me because I liked her. She loved me, present and absent, when I deserved it and when I didn't not because of who I was then or might be now but because, like her, I loved my friend. She was an admirable person, a good mother, a good friend. 

I cannot even offer my condolences in person. I do not know if or how there might be a funeral. I cannot send flowers even with a card addressed, "In Memory of The Beloved Old Goat," in the hopes of making my friend laugh.

Her death shocks and horrifies me and as a nation we should be ashamed to let such people, and so many people die. I am so furious just now, and so sad. 

I trust she would understand and forgive me even for going on and on about myself, even now. I like to think that if she were here, my friend and I might make her laugh. I'm glad the person she loved best in the world was with her. I sent my love. I send it here again, to that silly, extraordinary woman I count my friend still, and to her surviving family likewise always kind to me, and to the memory of "_____'s Mom," my friend likewise, and me so much the better for it. I'll remember. I've learned. Thank you for the lesson among so many.

Daily Dose

From Essays One, by Lydia Davis

PROBABLY

"My mother's was probably the hand I held most often, during certain years of my life, first when my hand was small and hers was larger, and last when she was often lying on her bed and I was sitting beside her, her hand softer and weaker and more crooked than mine."

From Meeting Abraham Lincoln

Plates

When I was a boy, Christmas was uglier. I don't mean to say some of it isn't ugly now. Lord knows ugly never goes entirely out of style. But it's an option now; just one way to go among many: a majestic scotch pine with tastefully arranged, unpainted wooden toy miniatures from Norway and twinkling white lights, or a vintage steel tree with Hello Kitty bulbs and a slow strobing color-wheel. 'Cause ugly can be ironic now, right? Well, back in the day, ugly just happened, all over the place, and we liked it.

Remember plastic yard-Santas lit spookily from within by a single, naked lightbulb? Pressed plastic Christmas door decorations made from colored chips that up-close made Frosty look poxy? Primitive felt hangings, long as a hand-knit scarf, that wished us all a "Merr_ Christmas" with a missing "y"? Wax reindeer with repaired necks, and slightly melted sleighs? Cotton-batting snow-scenes gray with coal-smoke, and creepy eyeless angels with open screaming mouths, and the disembodied heads of Mr. and Mrs. Claus, with burnt-out red lightbulb noses, and everywhere tat and and faded tinsel, threadbare stockings and inedible, garishly striped candy, and Nativity scenes with a one-armed baby Jesus and or a one-horned cow with wide, staring eyes...

It all smelled of mothballs and attic-damp, sizzling wires, recurrent penury, and making do.

It wasn't, among other things, nice, because it wasn't any of it new. It was all of it ugly and wonderfully, magically reiterative, and now I must say, much missed.

When and where I was a child, there was a way to such things. Nothing then ever seemed to go entirely away. Boxes rose out of the basement way once a year and what was in them what what there was to be had. Grandmothers folded wrapping-paper like it was printed money and kept closets full of the stuff, plus unknotted ribbons, and crushed bows. They'd have saved the scotch-tape for reuse, if there'd been a way to unstick it and roll it back up. That was what you did, then, or so it seemed at least to me, as I knew no better.

There was a way to things, all things and no one seemed to question any of it, for good or bad, which would prove, later on, a problem.

For instance, there were rules then about to whom one might or ought to give what come Christmas. Not family, you understand. Family saw to themselves. You got what you wanted or didn't, what you needed or wished for, asked for, or begged. But, no. This was to do with the rest: neighbors and acquaintance, coworkers, school teachers and mailmen, the paperboy, your mother's beautician or your father's barber, the pastor's wife, receptionists, bank-clerks, the building "super", the ladies at the dry-cleaners. I suspect some of this survives somewhere still, though I don't know that to be the case. Times change. The old way of things dies. Customs cease to be. We're not talking ancient traditions here, or the faith of our fathers. No one's the wiser for not I suspect, and we move on.

School teachers, it goes almost without saying, were all ladies then. They might get an apple -- yes, that actually happened -- or fudge, but they were just as likely to receive face-powder from the Five and Dime, or a clam-shell compact, or jewelry so dazzlingly hideous that only a child could think it beautiful. Invariably a brooch -- pronounced "brewch"-- often of a seasonal theme, and worn proudly, at least once on sweater or dress, for all the world to see.

Cash was only appropriate, in a sealed envelope, for the mail carrier or the newspaper boy, or as a seasonably generous tip when one paid the bill at the barbers or a favorite diner. (Beauticians gave out rain-hats, folded like origami into impossibly small purses. Banks gave out rubber change-purses with an invisible slit that opened when squeezed, and a bath-tub chain on one end, or calendars, as did mechanics, insurance companies, and weirdly, funeral homes. And gas-stations and car-dealerships were the primary source of Christmas records. I don't know why, they just were.)

I could go on and I will, but not with this.

Mostly I remember plates, containers and plates.

We ate early, Christmas day. People did. Depending on the day when Christmas fell, people probably had to get up for work the day after. That was always the plan, anyway. There might be snow on the road though, people traveling from as far away as Ohio (!) though for the most part no further than the next county if that. Some people went to church all morning. Some people stayed out too late the night before. In the end, we ate when whatever the mystic and changeable quorum was formed, just before the bird went dry or the kids became completely ungovernable and had to be released out of doors. Whenever the magic hour, it was after of which I am thinking.

I would imagine people who host a dinner still send people home with food. We don't do parties much anymore, throwing or going, but I should think that that is still true. You make a plate or have a plate made for you. Dishes are washed and returned when practical, but a plate is a different business.  A plate is the proof of having been. A plate is abundance, satiety refuted, a promise for the New Year.

And a plate, a container, a tin, these were the last duty of the old year, every year.

My mother drove whatever my father had yet to sell on; cars from the auction or obscure private lots, anything with wheels that could be made to go, fixed up, repaired and polished and sold on. So riding in her car, weather permitting, or in my Dad's truck if not, every Christmas Eve and or Christmas Day, 'round we went with the plates, containers, and tins.

The world then was full of widowers who lived on isolated farms, single, retired school teachers, relatives of the most remote connection, people in need of a call, which did not involve the telephone in this sense.

Up and down country roads, in and out of town, the plates went out into the world like a humble hosanna: if not dinner, then fudge -- three kinds -- and divinity, Rice-Krispies treats, and cookies baked, and "no-bake", and yes, there might well be pie.

And the job of the passenger, my part of the mission would be to balance these plates on my knees, or keep the pie straight on a sloping car-seat. No easy thing, I might add, on a ten-year-old's knee, or in a temperamental Chrysler without power-steering.

Always late. Always hurried, exhaustion thick as the ice on the road and sometimes on the inside of the windows.

And yet, every plate might require a visit. That was the reason to bring a kid, you see. Keep the car running, send the boy in proper boots but only a sweater up to the door. Clever that, strategic. Ring the bell or knock, give over the plate or the tin, effusive thanks or a grim nod, and then a wave from the driver and off again to the next.

In a perfect world.

The reality usually meant standing in cold hallways, or worse, sitting on scratchy horsehair-furniture,  little houses full medicinal smells and old dark rooms, drafty kitchens devoid of sound, or radios so old they still glowed, or televisions that were never shut off. I remember rented rooms where a meal was served on a TV-tray, old-folks' homes twilit even in broad day, the friend who lived in a camper, another in a house with tar-paper walls. I am just old enough to have wished a Merry Christmas to someone lit by a single kerosene lamp.

In all that was ugly then, garish and battered and broken-down, was there not something fine as well? Something not to do with good taste so much as utility and good intentions? A lesson in want, yes, worthy of Dickens, but also in a righteous disregard of new and useless things, in kindness extended without thought to even the unhappy, the garrulous, the grim, the isolated and the ugly, "to the least of these", if I remember my Matthew's Gospel.

My mother now is herself too old to stir fudge, or drive a Chrysler through the snow. Her Christmas dinner comes now across the yard from my brother's house. All those she might have visited, visit her now only in dreams.

When and where I was a child, there was a way to such things.  There may be yet.

Make a plate if you can. Doesn't matter if it's paper, or the container used to be full of Cool Whip, or the tin has a hideous, one-eyed reindeer from being washed too many times. Doesn't matter even what's on the plate, though be honest, we all hope it tastes good. That's the only taste that matters, frankly. So make a plate or take one, but remember --

Somebody's going to need to have that back.

Yet More Chickens

Stella's Chickens

Daily Dose

From Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche

ONE DAY

"'One day they will be grown and leave home and you will just be a source of embarrassment or exasperation for them and they won't take your phone calls or won't call you for weeks,' Obinze said, and as soon as he said it, he wished he had not. It was petty, it had not come out as he intended. But Ojuiugo was not offended. She shrugged and said, 'Then I will just carry my bag and go and stand in front of their house.'"

From Chapter 24

Daily Dose

From Ordinary Light: A Memoir, by Tracy K. Smith

WASN'T

"I wasn't quite my mother then, either; maybe I was the idea of her younger self, the one I sometimes tried to reach with my thoughts, the one who would surely have wanted to live in that delicate exhalation of jasmine and new grass and, deeper under the surface, a living kind of heat. Like a young woman's wish, if such a thing could be weighted to the skin."

From Kathleen

Mum

Mum and the Dogs

It didn't start with dogs, it started with flamingos.

Every year when I go home to Pennsylvania to see family, I sleep in what was my old bedroom. Nowadays my old room is full of my mother's crafting projects; painted slates, decoupage. (I admire the things she makes. I have four pieces at my desk at work, and keep a painted tea-kettle and a collage coffee-pot in my library at home.) Most of her projects get cleared away before I come to visit. (It's a lot.) And on what will be my nightstand again, next to the button-lamp my mother made, there they are: two ceramic planters in the shape of spaniels, one green, one red. They're decorated with a kind of swirling, 70s, floral mange and they have daisies for tails. Their heads are elongated as if they are being pulled slowly into the gravitational field of a black hole. Their dead eyes stare at me when I reach to turn out the light every night. They are hideous. My mother knows this. I hasten to add, my mother did not make these abominations. (My mother's projects are actually rather beautiful.) The dogs came from an auction box, or a yard-sale, years ago. Their only purpose is to taunt me. They're a running joke between my Mum and me; call it, Brad's War on Kitsch.

As I say, it started with lawn-flamingos.

When I was a child, we went sailing on the weekends.  Never had a boat.  Not much for being on the water.  Yard-sailing, we went, my mother and I.  My hometown, hers too, didn't have a bookstore.  Still doesn't.  We went to yard sales because we were, if not poor, far from "comfortable," as the rich say. My mother likes a bargain. I needed books. The Thursday paper listed yard sales.  Sometimes the listing mentioned books.  We always went to those first. If we could, we'd try to go Fridays. First day had the best stuff, before it "gets all picked over." I had school and Mum worked, so we had to go early or not at all. She cleaned college dormitories, which was horrible, and the homes of the local professional-class; professors, doctors, and the like.

I couldn't have been more than ten when I tripped to the fact that any house with a lawn-flamingo was unlikely to have books, and even if books were advertised, the books would not amount to much if there was a flamingo in the yard. My mother found my snobbish deduction hilarious, but over time had to admit the truth of it.

When I came home from college for the first time, my father made a sign for the yard that read "Welcome Home Brad." My mother put lawn-flamingos on either side of it and stood grinning by them as we pulled into the driveway. After that, it was our "thing."

For my last birthday I got a shirt with tiny flamingo print, a necklace of flamingos, a flamingo that nods in the sun, etc., etc. In my middle-fifties. Mum's in her eighties. The woman is relentless.

Actually, my mother is known for for her style. Her taste is good. She dresses well, never leaves the house without her face, has an eye for fabrics, and color, and drape. She taught me to see beauty in simplicity, utility, age. She doesn't know the word, but she has always been quick to point out the ersatz and to find the one good thing amidst the dross. Were I to find fault now I'd just say she's always been sentimental and likes "cute things" simply for being "cute," and that we do not share.

It was, I think, my father who bought the painted plaster dogs that lived either side of the front door. These were ugly; machine-made, badly painted, clumsy. I found their ugliness offensive. I would hide them behind the furniture. Likewise I'm pretty sure Dad was the one who got the Fork and Spoon salt-and-pepper-shakers I hated as a kid. I thought them impossibly tacky. My mother thought them "cute." I used to hide them in a cookie jar that sat unused on top of the refrigerator. My mother is short and could not reach them there. They didn't "go" with the china I liked. Quite the little aesthete, setting the table in the double-wide.

I was an insufferable little shit, is what I was.

One Christmas, my mother sent me the Fork and Spoon salt-and-pepper-shakers, beautifully wrapped. Next time I went back for a visit, I hid them in plain sight in her china-cabinet. Got them again the next year for Christmas. I made her a calendar the year after; color pictures of Fork and Spoon, in a different setting each month: under a palm tree in California, in the mountain snow, visiting Las Vegas.

It was a thing.

And now the dogs. In retirement my father made a living from reselling stuff he bought in auction-lots: furniture, housewares, collectibles, "junk." The dogs came from there. My mother it was who probably rescued them from "down in the building" where such stuff is sold. Brought them up to the house specifically to put them by my guest bed, just to goad me. Relentless. She doesn't even much like dogs.

Dad did. He always kept dogs. Blueticks, bloodhounds, beagles, and mongrels, some for hunting, some to race, some just company, but all his dogs. When the last ancient beagle, slow as death and deaf as a post, went off after a rabbit and never came back, Dad said he was done. "Too old to chase her," he said, "home or heaven, up to her." He was right. She was his last dog.

My mother only ever had the one dog, Buster. Only animal big enough to bathe that ever lived in her house -- other than us. Buster was his name. Buster was special. A bright little terrier-mix. He'd hide under the sofa and growl when my scary grandmother came every day. Smart. He stayed when I left for college. When he died on the road, my mother said she'd never have another dog and she never has. People tried to give her dogs, still do, but no. My brother's dog, Bear comes across the yard from his house to hers every day now. Brings her the newspaper and gets a treat. Since my father died, when they bring my mother's supper, Bear brings the bread in a bag, or a napkin, something, just to have something to bring. That's his job. Otherwise he sits on the porch mostly.

Nowadays, my mother's mostly alone.

When Dad was still alive, he was in on the running joke too, specially around Christmas. One year they sent me a giant tin frog for the yard. Not pretty. Another time they sent an antique mirror decorated with -- wait for it -- painted pink flamingos. You get the picture. Relentless.

I still have Fork and Spoon, by the way. Mum has a picture of them framed in my old room. Everybody wins.

Auden said that the surest sign that a person had taste was that the person was never sure of it. I don't known that I'm sure of nearly so much as I was when I was fifteen. Fork and Spoon seem rather dear to me now.

But those ceramic spaniels? Those things are just ugly as sin.

Well played, old woman, well played.

Miss you.

Daily Dose

From Collected Poems, by Mark Strand

MY MOTHER ON AN EVENING IN LATE SUMMER

When the moon appears
and a few wind-stricken barns stand out
in the low-domed hills
and shine with a light
that is veiled and dust-filled
and that floats upon the fields,
my mother, with her hair in a bun,
her face in shadow, and the smoke
from her cigarette coiling close
to the faint yellow sheen of her dress,
stands near the house
and watches the seepage of late light
down through the sedges,
the last gray islands of cloud
taken from view, and the wind
ruffling the moon's ash-colored coat
on the black bay.

2
Soon the house, with its shades drawn closed, will send
small carpets of lampglow
into the haze and the bay
will begin its loud heaving
and the pines, frayed finials
climbing the hill, will seem to graze
the dim cinders of heaven.
And my mother will stare into the starlanes,
the endless tunnels of nothing,
and as she gazes,
under the hour's spell,
she will think how we yield each night
to the soundless storms of decay
that tear at the folding flesh,
and she will not know
why she is here
or what she is prisoner of
if not the conditions of love that brought her to this.

3
My mother will go indoors
and the fields, the bare stones
will drift in peace, small creatures -
the mouse and the swift - will sleep
at opposite ends of the house.
Only the cricket will be up,
repeating its one shrill note
to the rotten boards of the porch,
to the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark,
to the sea that keeps to itself.
Why should my mother awake?
The earth is not yet a garden
about to be turned. The stars
are not yet bells that ring
at night for the lost.
It is much too late.

Daily Dose

From The Works of Anne Bradstreet, edited by Jeannine Hensley

BEFORE THE BIRTH OF ONE OF HER CHILDREN

All things within this fading world hath end,
Adversity doth still our joys attend;
No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,
But with death’s parting blow are sure to meet.
The sentence past is most irrevocable,
A common thing, yet oh, inevitable.
How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend,
How soon’t may be thy lot to lose thy friend,
We both are ignorant, yet love bids me
These farewell lines to recommend to thee,
That when the knot’s untied that made us one,
I may seem thine, who in effect am none.
And if I see not half my days that’s due,
What nature would, God grant to yours and you;
The many faults that well you know I have
Let be interred in my oblivious grave;
If any worth or virtue were in me,
Let that live freshly in thy memory
And when thou feel’st no grief, as I no harmes,
Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms,
And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains
Look to my little babes, my dear remains.
And if thou love thyself, or loved’st me,
These O protect from stepdame’s injury.
And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,
With some sad sighs honor my absent hearse;
And kiss this paper for thy dear love’s sake,
Who with salt tears this last farewell did take.

Daily Dose

From Chicago Poems, by Carl Sandburg

 III. HOME

Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of:
I heard it in the air of one night when I listened
To a mother singing softly to a child restless and angry in the darkness.

From Poems Done on a Late Night Car

Daily Dose

From Poems Of William Butler Yeats, Revised Edition

THE PLAYER QUEEN

(Song from an Unfinished Play)

My mother dandled me and sang,
“How young it is, how young!”
And made a golden cradle
That on a willow swung.

“He went away,” my mother sang,
“When I was brought to bed,”
And all the while her needle pulled
The gold and silver thread.

She pulled the thread and bit the thread
And made a golden gown,
And wept because she had dreamt that I
Was born to wear a crown.

“When she was got,” my mother sang,
“I heard a sea-mew cry,
And saw a flake of the yellow foam
That dropped upon my thigh.”

How therefore could she help but braid
The gold into my hair,
And dream that I should carry
The golden top of care?

Daily Dose

From The Complete Poems of Emily Dickenson

NATURE -- THE GENTLEST MOTHER IS (790)

Nature — the Gentlest Mother is,
Impatient of no Child —
The feeblest — or the waywardest —
Her Admonition mild —

In Forest — and the Hill —
By Traveller — be heard —
Restraining Rampant Squirrel —
Or too impetuous Bird —

How fair Her Conversation —
A Summer Afternoon —
Her Household — Her Assembly —
And when the Sun go down —

Her Voice among the Aisles
Incite the timid prayer
Of the minutest Cricket —
The most unworthy Flower —

When all the Children sleep —
She turns as long away
As will suffice to light Her lamps —
Then bending from the Sky —

With infinite Affection —
And infiniter Care —
Her Golden finger on Her lip —
Wills Silence — Everywhere —

Daily Dose

From Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman

UNFOLDING OUT OF THE FOLDS OF THE WOMAN

Unfolded out of the folds of the woman, man comes unfolded, as is always to come unfolded,
Unfolded only out of the superbest woman of the earth, is to come the superbest man of the earth,
Unfolded out of the friendliest woman, is to come the friendliest man,
Unfolded only out of the perfect body of a woman, can a man be formed of perfect body,
Unfolded only out of the inimitable poem of the woman, can come the poems of man—only thence have my poems come,
Unfolded out of the strong and arrogant woman I love, only thence can appear the strong and arrogant man I love,
Unfolded by brawny embraces from the well-muscled woman I love, only thence come the brawny embraces of the man,
Unfolded out of the folds of the woman's brain, come all the folds of the man's brain, duly obedient,
Unfolded out of the justice of the woman, all justice is unfolded,
Unfolded out of the sympathy of the woman is all sympathy;
A man is a great thing upon the earth, and through eternity—but every jot of the greatness of man is unfolded out of woman,
First the man is shaped in the woman, he can then be shaped in himself.