Asking for Stories, Part 2

Somewhere in my study, I have a once-crisp envelope, now worn soft and gray. It has a fold in the middle from all the times it has been carried in a coat pocket or stuffed in a purse. The envelope and the letter inside it bear my mother's elegant script, written--as always--with an ultra-fine point pen. (This was always a difference between us: with some accounting experience in her background, she liked pens that wrote with clean, precise, fine lines--perfect for her sophisticated handwriting--, whereas I have always liked to press hard with my pens and roll across a page with a bold, sometimes smudged, looping script.)

My Mom's letter is written on an ordinary 6" x 9" writing tablet, the same one she used for grocery lists and things that needed to be done in preparation for a holiday gathering or vacation. She wrote on the fronts of three pages, and then the backs, something I always found curious. (How did she know when she was halfway through the letter? How did she know when to switch to writing on the back sides of the sheets?) One of the pages of the letter is ripped in half, just from being folded and unfolded so many times.

I had written to her first. I was a freshman in college, questioning my life's purpose. More accurately, I had wailed on paper in melodramatic fashion about how no one seemed to understand me and accept me for who I was. I had cried out in my letter, "Why? Why me? Why am I different? Why don't I fit in?" I begged for validation, for understanding. I begged, without realizing it, for the story of who I was, and, while I knew my mother would write something back, I know I did not expect the extremely eloquent, moving, grace-filled response that came in the mail several days later.

My mother's response-letter is one of my most treasured possessions, although I often don't know exactly where it is. I tend to bury it in the clutter of my books, files, bills, papers, and assorted memorabilia, and I like it that way. I like losing my mother's letter every once in a while because I like rediscovering it, which is, perhaps, a summary of my relationship to all my best stories.

When it comes right down to it, I'm sure I inherited my love of stories from my Mom, a woman who treated library cards as sacred objects that were meant to be revered; a woman who set the pattern for my "book binges," returning from any library trip with a huge stack of books that she'd devour in a matter of days; a woman who could never be convinced to spring for one of the plastic toys at the supermarket, but who somehow always found a way to buy books, fund educational field trips, pay for dance lessons, and purchase over time a set of World Book Encyclopedias. My Mom was my partner in crime in my adolescent years, when I became fascinated with classic movies. She would check out the TV Guide and tell me what movies I "needed" to see that week. She had no problem with my napping after school and waking up at one in the morning (even on school nights) to watch a black and white movie on the Late, Late Show. (In fact, she would often watch with me!) Mom would spend hours in discussion with me over the books I was reading in school, and she was not afraid to let my sister and me watch controversial but thought-provoking films and TV shows... provided, of course, that we did think--and discuss--afterwards.

Mom taught me, too, to be attentive to the stories of the people right in front of me. She taught me to suspend judgment and look below the surface. I absorbed her story about being snowed in at a lodge with a bunch of stranded travelers and sharing stories through the evening with a woman who worked as a prostitute--a woman, my devout Catholic mother said, who was more beautiful on the inside than some people who went to church all the time. I absorbed her story about Roderick, the little boy who always ran up to talk to her when she volunteered on the playground of our elementary school in 1960's and 1970's Detroit... and who wondered if she (an older white woman) remembered him (a young black man) when he ran into her many years later in a supermarket parking lot. She did, and he hugged her and made her day.

In her letter, my Mom told me the story of me. She shared what she knew about me from her perspective: specific examples of my gifts and talents, specific examples of the social pains I had suffered. She had heard; she had seen; she had witnessed. When I needed it most, she reminded me--on paper, so I could read it over and over again--that I was a person of value. Without having any concrete answers to give, she managed to teach me one of her many lessons about our life-stories: "You know how a puzzle has to be fitted together," she wrote of my questions and confusions, "piece by piece until the whole emerges."