When I was nine or ten, my mother and I were in the hunter green Jeep Cherokee Laredo
Sport?
Limited?
That probably came later.
We were driving to American Cover Miss and Cover Boy USA
New England Finals
on the way to the hotel ballroom at Bradley International Airport. My mother has long maintained that my brother and I—ruined her—
“Gigantic babies, both of you. Charlie was over nine pounds!”
And now she has to stop to pee on road trips, forever.
Anyway, she needs to pee.
So she pulls off at the next exit and parks by the rest stop bathroom.
Bathroom to the left, dumpster directly in front of us.
And beside the dumpster, there stands an old man, rifling through the trash.
I have never had any control of this when it strikes me, and it does now and I do, and raging rivers cascade down my cheeks.
No.
My mom thinks this is nice and cute, I guess.
And goes to the bathroom and continues on toward the pageant.
Years later, at Kairos 50, my mother was instructed to write me a letter. All the other college students at the retreat were ripping open five, ten page handwritten letters from their mothers.
My mother typed, didn’t write (too revealing?) a very brief letter in what had to be 22 point Times New Roman. I was a little surprised she’d written at all: this type of emotional connection—the difficult, beautiful, truthful and healing kind—not just big bursts of hurt and crazy and the wall—are not her bag.
In her letter, she disobeyed the apparent orders, and wrote about herself, and her own growth, and her own hope for that growth to continue. That she’d been in a thick fog for a long time, but that she felt herself reaching towards light, now, that she could finally see. She was emerging. She knew I would cheer for that, and I did! And then toward the end, she wrote that
She would never forget the moment I saw that old man going through the trash and burst into tears at the rest stop.
The letter was dated February 19, 2006.
Little did she know what would follow in March.
The light had been patient.
It would wait no longer to show her.
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