A scrap of a mother’s reading
“I remember your
mother was reading Thomas Merton when we came to visit in Menasha in the summer
of 1969,” Jim Kari told me.
And I remember
she later read a book about Tunisian village life because my sister had been there
in the Peace Corps.
And I remember
in the weeks before she and my father moved from the wastes of northern Wisconsin
she read Hannah Green’s THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE because Hannah was the first
person I knew who had published an actual book.
And the book
lead my mother to tell me of being a young woman and having to sit the whole
night through watching the coffined corpse of her grandfather in the sitting room
of the big house in Marlboro, New York where the fields all about were mortgaged
to strangers, where his prize chickens ran loose and hungry, where there was a
room in the basement, as she said, full
of the empty bottles he had drained looking for the reason for sending away his
wife and children: the eldest son being
my mother’s father and who on the death refused to attend the wake and funeral,
Of his three
fortunes there remained only the debts and my mother’s wait by his bier
performing the duty of the eldest child of the eldest son who had nothing but
hatred to guide him through life.
And now she
is dead.
1972
INFORMATION> This
is a scrap out of the soon to be waste of my so-called writing life.
