Gifts My Mother Gave Me

 The best gift my mother has given me is not the beautiful watercolor of peonies that hangs in my daughter’s room or the lovely hand-painted cards—adorned with cats and flowers and birds--that have marked almost every birthday. As much as I treasure these, the best gifts my mother has given me are her love and her curiosity, her interest in people and politics, literature and geography, music, business and science, art and architecture and subjects too numerous to name.  The sense that there is always more to know, to enjoy, to discover.

 

I started thinking about this after attending a reading from What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-one Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most, a collection of essays edited by Elizabeth Benedict. Halfway through this volume I’m finding the essays uneven, some inspired, entertaining and moving, others giving the impression that this was a kind of “what I did on my summer vacation” assignment for the author. Highlights include Lisa See’s piece about her mother the author, Carolyn See, who taught her to “write a thousand words and one charming note” each day; Roxana Robinson’s  piece about receiving her much longed-for horse as a girl, because her mother “believed that every child should receive a heart’s desire; and Margo Jefferson’s description of the “armor” her mother gave her, a love of high fashion that shielded her from exclusion and inferiority.

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One of the best books I’ve read about mothers and daughters was a recent find, a young adult novel by Rita Williams-Garcia: One Crazy Summer follows the journey of Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern, three young girls who are sent to California to see the mother who abandoned them, when the youngest girl was still an infant. Cecile, who now calls herself NZila, is a poet whose skills as a typesetter and ownership of a printing press, has led to her somewhat uneasy alliance with the Black Panthers in her Oakland community.  

 

Faced with a mother who cannot reconcile parenting with writing, and at a crossroads between being “a respectable Negro” who avoids unwelcome attention—lessons their grandmother taught them—and asserting their right to the same respect accorded to non-African-Americans, the girls undergo some remarkable changes.

 

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With so many recommendations in the blogosphere for Mother’s Day reading and viewing I thought I’d add a few of my own:  

•  Sue Miller’s The Good Mother, which impressed me with its excellent and complicated depiction of a divorced woman’s struggle to balance motherhood and sexuality.

•  Towheads, a film by Shannon Plumb, and

• 13 Mother’s Day poems, courtesy of the Poetry Foundation. 

 

Happy Mother’s Day to all the wonderful moms in my life!

Nothing Like the Sun: Celebrating Shakespeare’s Birthday

The weather was anything but sunny today in Central Park, but this event brought out about 100 celebrants. 

Bundled against the unseasonable cold in hats and gloves, and even a few down coats, people ranging in age from teenagers to those in their 70s or 80s read the sonnets in numerical order.   Many of the readings were beautifully done, thoughtful, expressive, and dramatic. I think there were more than a few actors in the group of volunteer readers.

Beethoven looks on from across the way.

Here’s Sonnet 130 – one of my favorites.

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips ’red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow upon her head..

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks,

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound.

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.

            And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

            As any she belied with false compare.

And here is Alan Rickman’s seductive reading of the same.

While looking at this poem again I thought about what a good title Nothing Like the Sun might be for a piece of fiction or other work of art. Turns out not only did Sting record an album with this title, but Anthony Burgess gave this name to his novel about Shakespeare. Per Wikipedia:

Nothing Like the Sun is a fictional recreation of Shakespeare's love-life and an examination of the supposedly partly syphilitic sources of the bard's imaginative vision. The novel, which drew on Edgar I. Fripp's 1938 biography Shakespeare, Man and Artist, won critical acclaim and placed Burgess among the first rank novelists of his generation.

It's National Library Workers Day!

 

 

 

Thanks to all the librarians and other library staff who have helped make my reading life so pleasurable. This year I'm especially greatful for the wonderful staff at the New York Society Library for creating such a welcoming and peaceful atmosphere for all kinds of readers and writers.