Another Birthday

I didn’t forget. I just wondered whether my practice of recognizing my mother’s birthday was unnecessary. Or maudlin. Or just odd. Ultimately, I decided it might be all of the above, but I opted to go on record to acknowledge it nonetheless. So, today would have been Mom’s birthday again. She was born in 1908. It seems like a million years ago. She never knew cell phones, Facebook, the horrors of Donald Trump, or garage doors that opened with the push of a button. Yet she didn’t complain that she never had access to a future that left her behind. Nor should any of us. We can’t know what we don’t know, nor can we know what we won’t know because aren’t there to know it. You know. Sort of ad infinitum. I’m not going to bother with spell check. At least not at this moment. At any rate, Happy Birthday, Mom. Were I a religious man, I’d wish you happiness in heaven. But as a heathen, I’ll say only that I still miss you and wish I could have told you all the things about which I later learned you were spot on; and I was wrong. But not everything, of course. You were not always right. But usually, you had reasons for the errors of your ways. Unlike me.