Here's Why Every Day Is Mother's Day

We just watched "Away We Go" and it started me thinking about mothers. Mothers were always so much older than me, usually pretty stern, but strong and tough. (Like pioneer women or Beverly Crusher.) It seems so many of my friends and acquaintances are having children and it's both exciting and fear-inducing. It's weird to think that I'm older than my parents were when I was born - the old photographs of their '70s glory with tinted eyeglasses and demure sun dresses.


This is by Scott Cairns, a poet I'll always hold very dear. In college, he kind of became the mascot for our fledgling Dead Poets Society. We took a trip to Memphis to hear him read and it was all the joy, nostalgia, adrenaline, meditation and love you can cram into a 3-day trip , and we all dressed up in our fanciest clothes to celebrate a poet and all poets and all poetry, and we parked outside the venue as the sun went down to doze listening to Chopin's "Nocturnes" and on the drive back to school put on "Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk" and "The Complete Robert Johnson Recordings" on the stereo to cover the awestruck silence we could never name or acknowledge we felt because it would evaporate like dew on the shore of the Wolf River.


Scott Cairns taught me that you didn't have to be dead and famous to be great. The Old Masters weren't old when they made their art. Life is just as good and bad now as it ever was or will be. And life will always go on, until it doesn't. And after it doesn't, it still goes on. 


Here's one for all the mothers I know.

The Turning of Lot's Wife

Scott Cairns

Genesis 19. 23-26

First of all, she had a name, and she had a history.
She was Marah, and long before the breath of
death's angel turned her to bitter dust, she had
slipped from her mother's womb with remarkable
ease, had moved in due time from infancy to
womanhood with a manner of grace that came to
be the sole blessing of her aging parents. She was
beloved.

And like most daughters who are beloved by both a
mother and a father, Marah moved about her city
with unflinching compassion, tending to the
dispossessed as if they were her own. And they
became her own. In a city given to all species of
excess, there were a great many in agony--
abandoned men, abandoned women, abandoned
children. Upon these she poured out her substance
and her care.

Her first taste of despair was at the directive of the
messengers, who announced without apparent
sentiment what was to come, and what was to be
done. With surprising banality, they stood and
spoke. One coughed dryly into his fist and would
not meet her eyes. And one took a sip from the cup


she offered before he handed it back and the two
disappeared into the night.


Unlike her husband--coward and sycophant--the
woman remained faithful unto death. For even as
the man fled the horrors of a city's conflagration,
outrunning Marah and both girls as they all rushed
into the desert, the woman stopped. She looked
ahead briefly to the flat expanse, seeing her tall
daughters, whose strong legs and churning arms
were taking them safely to the hills; she saw,
farther ahead, the old man whom she had served
and comforted for twenty years. In the impossible
interval where she stood, Marah saw that she could
not turn her back on even one doomed child of the
city, but must turn her back instead upon the
saved.