I remember my mom turning 45.
I was in sixth grade and my little brother was in 2nd? 3rd maybe? and we were living in Bloomington, Indiana while my dad was on sabbatical shadowing Bobby Knight’s basketball program at IU. It was the 88-89 season and the Hoosiers had just come off their NCAA title win in 1987.
We took a year off of Southern California and moved to Bloomington, Indiana where we rented a house owned by a university professor on leave or fellowship or something abroad.
On the morning my brother and I made breakfast for my mom on her birthday, we gathered around the card table that was our dining room appointment and took a picture holding the poster sign we had made for her (or was it my dad?). We have the picture, that’s why we remember.
That house came fully furnished but also not that furnished. And way too many waterbeds. We all took turns in the room with the water bed.
That house was just across the street from the school we attended, it was the sight of a gruesome hamster decapitation that awoke us to the reality that you can’t put two hamsters in a cage together and it was the place I wore my first pink winter coat my mom bought on lay away for me at Best and I wanted to wear it in the California heat as soon as we had paid it off. (It was too hot for that).
All this to say I’m turning 45 next week and fudge that. Forty five, for my mom, was the first birthday of her’s I remember. What was I doing in the previous years? Probably something super childish and selfish, but then, in sixth grade, she was a little more of person and so was I.
That year was pretty life changing actually. We toured all over the eastern seaboard, we spent more time together that year than ever before because we were all strangers in a stange land. I joined the IU children’s choir and spent 4 hours every Saturday learning theory, ear training, choral pieces and more. That kinda changed my life not to mention the NASA visit, the House of Congress, the Civil War battlefields, Plymouth Rock, Boston, Philly and I haven’t even told you the Bobby Knight stories….
So my sixth grade self is now my mom’s age self and the road before me is like her’s but probably without the Phen phen magic pills, middle school teaching jobs and AFS. However it might shepherd in the end of the golden age and the chapter where children fade away and so do I. It might be that I learn the hard lesson of a sinner in need of savior with a front row seat to all the wrong I ever did with family members like me to hold me to unconditional reproach. That might be what we share. And then I’ll disappear like she did and the sinner in need of a savior will wait for her savior to return and so on and so forth. Role creds.
That got DARK. Sorry everyone. I get to play the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville, The Songbird Circle in St. Louis and then I get to go to Paris in April. Beauty mixed with sorrow is a thing. Thanks for being awesome.