Posts tagged “history”

One of the (very, very many) things that suck about losing your mom before forty is that I remember almost nothing about my own daily life prior to high school. And because my parents were divorced and I only got to see dad for a few weeks in the summer every year, there’s nobody I can ask. I have two sons and am constantly writing (and printing) notes and reminders for them, like, “You loved to eat oatmeal with blueberries and pineapple every morning for breakfast in my forty-two year-old Empire Strikes Back cereal bowl until you were six and decided that you hate oatmeal.” Or, “If you want to make pancakes the right way you have to use the frying pan with the blue enamel.” I would probably collapse in a puddle if I ever found even a single note like this from mom. She was a writer and left hundreds of notebooks and thousands of loose pages of things. She wrote me cards and letters nearly daily from the day I left for college until shortly before she died, but sadly I’ve never found anything along those lines.

“They’re espadrilles but they’re flat,” my wife said to me in Rome with the same mistaken confidence it would be understood as if I’d remarked to her that Chamberlain should never have been fooled by the Stresa Conference and appeasement was always destined to fail.

This is going to kill my weekend. I’ve maxed out at 13 and can’t seem to beat that.