Mom’s losing her memory, and she’s not always at the top of her game.  She’s up in Wisconsin now, with the local monsterlings, hosting a good Collins Christmas, and I’m not there.  I’m not there, even though I know that she is leaving us, bit by bit.  So this is my homage to Mom.

Caroline was the second youngest of her clan, Guy and Martha, John and herself, and Baby Dick.  Guy’s gone, and Martha’s not in very good shape, and John died when he was a young man, of leukemia.  They grew up in Winnetka, outside of Chicago, and though Guy Senior was a Protestant, he permitted Martha Gertrude to raise the kids Catholic, because he was a lawyer and wanted them to learn Latin and Greek.  So, in their pre-teens, all the boys were sent away to St. Johns in Wisconsin, and the girls were sent to school with the French nuns, where they learned to curtsey and read Racine.  Guy went to the U of Chicago, and the others to Northwestern, except for Baby Dick, who railroaded west for Stanford.

At college Mom studied literature, some, and spent a good deal of time having fun with her sorority sisters.  She did study Ulysses with Richard Ellman, in part because Yul Brenner was enrolled in the class and it gave her ample opportunity for swooning, which was in style, and I have her copy of that great novel with her marginalia, including the note to the opening of the second part, about Leopold Bloom eating with relish the inner organs of, & cet, with the charming notation:  But Bloom is a Jew!  She went on after college to get her teaching degree, which she said was the biggest pile of hooey she’d ever pursued.  She met Dad, newly graduated from Notre Dame, and about to enter med school at Loyola, but continued for a time to date a fellow who owned a sailboat and could take her for afternoon jaunts on Lake Michigan.

When they announced their engagement, her brothers teased her father that they guessed that he’d have to clamp down on his references to “flannel-mouthed Irishers,” to which he replied that there’d be none of that sort of talk under his roof.  Dad, formally asking mom’s parents for her hand had Grandma say, “Well, Dan, we’ve taught our children to make up their own minds, and now we’ve got to live with it.” Her father said, “Well, I suppose you’d better get married then; I don’t want any little bastards running around in the family.”

What was she like?  She wore sweaters, rather fetchingly, and knee-length skirts, and a page-boy cut.  She smoked cigarettes out of a holder, and wore gloves.  She had the gift of laughter, above all at herself.  She liked The Drifters and the Ink-Spots, and after she and Dad honeymooned in Jamaica she loved to listen to Calypso.  Her mother told her, “Caroline, never learn to sew, for if you do, men will expect you to do it for the rest of your life,” and as a result I and Tim were the only Scouts in our troop, years later, to have their merit badges stapled to their uniforms.  She had a deadly two-handed set shot, and could hit free-throws in dozens, underhanded.  A southpaw, she threw like a girl, to some extent, but with extraordinary accuracy.  She had a deadly short-range golf game, and a sharp tennis serve.  She skied and enjoyed a glass of wine in the lodge afterwards.  She was known for her dazzling good nature, and though generous to a fault with others could give a merchant living hell if dissatisfied with his wares or service.  She could unicycle and play the harmonica and ukelele, but could not sing. 

She is my mother, soft and warm and kind, the smell of laundry drying in the sunlight on a summer’s day.  The heaviness of my father she alleviated always with her “French conscience.” As much as I love her, I understand, being a father myself, that I can never love her as much as she loves me.  And yet she taught me to love, and to adore women as I do.  My devotion to the Virgin is because of her.

So here, on this Christmas Eve, the wrapping of presents almost done, I write to you what I cannot say to you yet, for fear that the day will come sooner, here, where you’re not liable to read it, perhaps as a sort of rehearsal, perhaps for one of my siblings to find someday: I love you with all of my heart, even though I know it is less than you love me.  And perhaps life, eventually, will teach me to love as you do, in the fullness of time.  Goodnight, Mom.  Merry Christmas.