Things are pretty lousy, for a calendar girl

And they all pretend they’re orphans and their memory’s like a train
You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away
And the things you can’t remember tell the things you can’t forget
That history puts a saint in every dream

I don’t remember my mother.

I remember her in pieces, in segments, like an orange scattered around my sink. A part of me knows that they all go together, that there’s a rind and a covering to place upon them, to tie them together.

But time steals those covers away, instead blankets my moments with fog and dream. I can see her face distantly, because I remember it from pictures, from kodak’s fading and crumbling. I don’t remember the color of her eyes though, or the sound of her voice. I no longer feel her touch upon my hands, my shoulders, yet I remember the heat of the curling iron she burnt my ear with so many sun lit mornings long ago.

I make poppyseed cake, and the first dirty bitter crunch of seed on my lips transports me to her kitchen, back to the wood stained warmth I hold secretly in my mind, back to a simpler place in my life. If only I could stop time, remain in place there, hold it in the palm of my hand and love it, really love it as I should.

Time isn’t meant to be held, anymore than my mother could be held. Life marches on. Time moves on. That place I want so badly to hold in my hand is colored by life, by growth, and by sadness. It’s not the same place I grew up, grew tall in. The house is older, crumbling in places. As am I.

I remember my mother in stories, in tales we tell, myths that grow stronger and taller with each passing year. In my hands my mother becomes a creature she wouldn’t have been in life, immortalized by years of creation and inference. I did not know her. My time with her short and stunted by age. Each year adds a lie, and an assumption so I can pretend to know the woman who waited years for me, who counted down her days and weeks looking for a child to call her own. I cause her to be better than she could be, as time blunts the edges and quiets the rage.

Now and then the past narrows and catches the now, grasps it tightly, pulls me backward so I cannot escape easily, absorbed by memory, singular moments in which I was, I believe I was happy and free. It latches to events, Lockerbie, Challenger, my father’s stained glass phase, my mother drinking Ensure, cookies during chemo, laughing threats in front of the Kingston Pen, root beer with no syrup, ruining my treat. I dance, I sigh, I sleep within these. I am stronger within these ties to my past.

But I cannot stay. Time marches on, marches to a beat I cannot discern or inhabit. It moves away from my mother, and that little girl quicker with each year, quicker still as I stare at my own daughters. And it gives me my mother back again, but from the other side, as time forces me to become my mother in small ways, in cuddles and punishments, in treats and baking. It creates me outside the bounds of when I was before. It lets me go.

*excerpt from “Time” by Tom Waits

Entry for Blogging for Books, since I feel like playing this month.