20-Minute Monday: (Cor)related

It's my Mom's 66th birthday today. I just tried phoning to wish her the best, but she's not home.

So I can't know for certain, but my guess is she has made note of turning 66 on the 22nd, will be able to find the number 3 somewhere in her day, and will have gleaned an extra layer of meaning out of the correlation.  Like a triple Golden Birthday.  Or, she might, at some point today, happen to be driving down a 66th Street or County Road 33. Or the hymn she'll be practicing for next Sunday's church service will be #822 or #845, or she'll notice the composer of the tune was born in 1945, too, or the lyricist was known to be born in Denver....like she was.

This is just how Mom rolls. She always finds these things, God bless her. Thrives on finding the small details of others' lives and their correlating meaning in the details of hers. 



3 generations
Post-first-marathon -- St. Paul MN, October 2002


She might, for example, just believe that the reason I am the most physically similar to her (5-foot-3, chest prominent, potato nose and button chin) of the 3 daughters is because I, too, was born on the 22nd of a month. (And the 2nd child, too!) Could be how we share the same mad piano skills and the same desire to tell any story, written or verbal, with every rich detail and self-deprecating foible it deserves. Enjoying the relative embarrassment, as if we want to make people laugh with us before laughing at us so we can be in on the joke first ... without really trying to be. Could be how we're both iron-certain of our musical opinions and not afraid to share. Sensitive to criticism but eventually brought around to see the truth. And both often told we are leaving our own relative well-beings behind in our quests to plan other people's happiness....as we would see it.

But of course it is only conjecture. She knows she's her own woman, I'm my own woman. Besides, my sisters, more than me by a long stretch, share Mom's desire to shower generosity and love on others when they sense others need it the most, for no other reason than because they have it to give. It's a fine quality, and numeric relativism has nothing to do with it.

Monday, August 22, 2011 (3:47-4:07 p.m.)

Copley Square