Three and a half life times ago, I started picture framing. But the half life before that, I was cleaning my mothers paint brushes, then helping her set type for her little Kelsey printing press. As we spend long evenings together printing, we would talk about stories and as we had certain ideas to those stories nailed down, we would right those ideas down on a yellow 3×5 card that was in a small stack bound with a red and a blue printers rubber bands.
Many years later, after my mother had died, my father much as an after thought handed me that little stack of cards still in the printers rubber bands, saying ‘I think your mother would have wanted you to have this’. Knowing full well what was in there, I just dropped the bundle into my desk drawer and forgot about it.
A couple of years later, as I was recovering from an industrial accident that left me with a back that was in so much pain that I couldn’t sleep for very long, couldn’t do much with my soon to be ex-girl friend, and bored to tears or at least enough to start cleaning out drawers and folding laundry. Not that my laundry was not folded, it was just not as neat as when I was in the Navy. And, so it was as I cleaned out my drawer and found the little bundle of stories.
As I slid the rubbers off the stack and started reading my mothers cramped but still beautiful writing, I kept thinking about it had been a shame that my mother had suffered from such low self esteem that she had never submitted a single story. All those years of a creative fertile mind, and not one completed manuscript. She had been a proofreader and professional typist, but never wrote.
And as I read through the cards, I thought that maybe I should write the stories and try to get them published, but I also knew that they weren’t my stories; not necessarily her’s either, but not mine to profit from. And at that very moment I was having my epiphany, a small piece of white paper dropped out of between the cards.
If she had written that one word just a few years later, it would have been on a Post-it. Oh, how mom would have loved Post-It notes. But this was a small strip of white not paper, up on which she had written in bold all caps a single word. A single word that I sat for at least a half hour reading over and over. A single word that the meaning I understood to the depths of my soul and that it was my entire inheritance. It was the only thing that she could leave me, that would be for me and me alone. And that single word would do what she could have only hoped on a tiny scale it would do, and it did so and so much more.
There on that tiny pieces of paper was written the one thing that she could never bring herself to approach, and yet, she wanted it for me.
Selfless, loving, imbuing with all the strength she could to reach back and push the young chick from the nest; and in her finest penmanship handwriting she commanded me to go forth and “Publish”.
Within two weeks, I had sold my first article. A story about my first motorcycle.
Some day, I will have to write a story about my second and third motorcycles, which she and I owned together. But then, that is for another day.
But here is to Mom. She would have really loved blogging.
