Happy Mother's Day!

Dear Mom,
      Thanks for the magic.  I try to use it almost every day.
Your son,
      Matthew David.




Frog: sculpture mix; green glazing, layered.
(This was one of my first guided sculptures, in a class, and my model was a toy frog.)

Dusk

I call this one The Watcher.

Sculpture mix; nutmeg and brown glazing.

Tonight felt right for pulling him out and taking a few potshots.

Dusky, dusky mood.

My mother would have been 76 today.

From my earliest days, she fostered my devotion to stories and magic.

Real magic: the sort you can find in the webbing of a frog's foot, in the whiskers of a ginger cat, in the earth around a tomato plant's roots, and in the sand, rock, and salt of the seashore. Driftwood, windfall, found coin. I am the son of a witch, as she always claimed, for which I am so grateful.

I wish you'd found the time and space to learn the piano, Mom. When I realize that I've been putting something -- some possible joy, however arduous or demanding -- off for too too long, I think of that wish of yours.

The Oil of Memory

Vitalis Hair Oil: that's what we used on our hair for school pictures each autumn when my brothers and I were boys. Mom would slick our hair into order, and our pale foreheads would shine in each photo, the only part of our faces not having been browned by the summer sun.

Later, she'd shift us to Protein 29 gel. Dad, I think, stayed true to the Vitalis for years to come.

My Mother Taught Me To Hunt

She did, indeed. "What did you learn in school today, Matthew?" she started asking when I was five. She made me feel I should learn things, so I pursued learning, sometimes relentlessly. Learning something (or, better, multiple "things" ) to bring home and share became proof of my prowess: a string of trout for the pan after a day of fishing for knowledge. And, she listened to my answers for so many years that I think about reporting what I've "caught" at the end of each day, still, even now.

(We didn't get along all the time, but those were absolute gifts.)

When I think of her, I now often think of the ending to Ted Kooser's poem "Mother":

But the iris I moved from your house

now hold in the dusty dry fists of their roots

green knives and forks as if waiting for dinner,

as if spring were a feast. I thank you for that.

Were it not for the way you taught me to look

at the world, to see the life at play in everything,

I would have to be lonely forever.

The poem's ending catches my sense of debt, of appreciation, and while I don't think I ever feared the spectre of loneliness the way the poem's speaker seems to have done, perhaps the gifts of seeking knowledge, of seeking life, and of reporting it, of sharing it, have protected me in their own way.

My mother died on a Friday, December 5th, back in 1997.

You should have quit smoking the day I turned eleven, Mom, the way you promised you would; I quit sneaking sips of beer that day, just as I said I would, and I didn't start again until years later when it became quite clear you weren't going to keep your part of our bargain. I know you had your reasons, but I'm still angry about that. Can you blame me?

Rest in peace, Mom. You need it, and you deserve it.

Your son,

Matthew David