Twenty years ago to honor our daughter, Wende, on her first official Mother’s Day, my mother, Vicki and I took an automobile trip to El Paso where she lived at the time.
As we entered the El Paso city limits my mother’s eyes brightened. She looked to the right and then to the left; she leaned forward and began to ask questions:
“Why is the land so green over there? Is that Mexico? What’s the population of El Paso? What do people do for fun around here?”
My mother, a lifelong learner, loves adventure and anything new. She has been across the United States more times than an Amtrak locomotive. For ten summers she had been a hostess for the YMCA in the Rockies in Estes Park, Colorado.
In all things cultural she reigns supreme: classical music, opera, the visual arts, literature and etiquette. To her dangling a participle, splitting an infinitive and mixing metaphors mark the unsophisticated as clearly as eating the main course with a salad fork.
And yet her worldliness fails to dampen her innocence. She remains as bright beamed as a child.
This point was driven home a few hours later as I watched Wende’s seven-month-old daughter, Lori, take in the world around her. Lori had the same excited naiveté as my mother 75-years her senior.
Counting Lori as a future mother we had four generations of mothers in the same room. From that experience I now know what makes grand parenting so special. A grandparent can enjoy a child without the daily responsibilities of parenting. But more important a grandmother enjoys watching her daughter love her child and remembers:
Thy art thy mother’s glass
and she in thee
calls back the lovely April of her prime.
A mother sees in her daughter the mother’s childhood reflected. The grandmother sees childhood and parenting reflected. Memories pile upon memories making each generation’s recollections richer.
Maybe memories make my mother meritocratic. A Spanish major, she wished to work for a major USA corporation as a translator in Mexico—an idea that failed to fit with my grandfather’s conservatism.
He clipped the wings of her ambition that enabled her, later, to encourage her sons to soar with the eagles. She told us that with hard work and perseverance we could achieve anything. She encouraged us to take risks, do things for the excitement of doing and, most important, to do our absolute best everyday.
On that trip 20-years ago for the sake of her unfulfilled college wishes, I took her to Juarez for Mother’s Day and got pleasure from her delight in wheeling and dealing in Spanish with the open market vendors. She conversed kindly with the beggars and laughed with the taxi drivers as they took us to restaurants unmarred by tourists.
She told me margaritas killed Giardia and E. Coli so we ate without fear. She must have been correct because we experienced no revenge from Montezuma.
Now 96-years old she is as frisky as a filly. She seems to get smarter every year. She visits art galleries and the opera; plays card with her friends; and goes to church each Sunday. She brightens any room.
May all mothers make memories as mine has made for me and may the eyes of sons and daughters mirror remembrances of things sought and gained.