If You Could Hear Me Think, This is What I'd Write, 1/29/23

I got a message from my mom over the weekend. That wouldn’t be strange, had Mom not died nearly two years ago. She did though, so the message was surprising, but ultimately comforting.

What you need to know is that Mom kept every scrap of my published writing from my high school and college years, and even some bits and pieces from beyond those years. When she and Lisa moved to their apartment in late 2020, I brought home yet another stack of my college newspapers.

I thought I had everything she’d saved and I was still figuring out what to do with it. But sometime in the last year, Lisa found one more bin of my stuff at the apartment. I brought it here and didn’t really look at any of it, at least not closely. Until this weekend.

Yesterday though, I went through the bin and found a copy of a goofy op-ed piece I wrote that was published in the Temple University News on November 15, 1985. The headline is “City is fun, but the suburbs are a real trip,” and that’s essentially what the piece is about: how odd fun can be found suburbs for college students who might need a break from the big city. It is moderately amusing, at best.

Honestly, it’s an essay I barely remember writing, but Mom enjoyed it. She enjoyed it so much that she wrote at the bottom of her copy, “This is one of my personal favorites.”

I never saw that note until yesterday. Did she write it as a reminder to herself that she liked the article? Or did she write it for me to see…someday? I will never know.

I do know this though: I will be grateful for the rest of my life that I had parents who encouraged whatever creative endeavors I decided to pursue. Mom and Dad were not exactly effusive in this encouragement – that wasn’t who they were – but whatever it was I was doing, they were there for it. I think Lisa would agree that they were there for her too. They just were.

This is important for a few reasons, other than the fact that I had great parents (which I did). First of all, while I still write – my livelihood depends on my writing – but lately I have experienced not really understanding the “why?” factor in my work. As in “why do I continue writing? Why do I need to do this?” When those questions loom, I begin to contemplate shutting down the whole enterprise, other than what I do for work. After all, I’ve got things going on in my life that are probably more important than trying to pursue some version of the weekly columnist I’ve always wanted to be.

Ultimately though, I write because I need to write, and that’s all there is to it. It just happens, whether anybody reads it or not. It’s been happening since I was seven or eight years old. It’s just who I am, and Mom and Dad knew that.

Secondly though, and I just realized this now, is that Mom enjoyed writing as well. Just weeks before she died, Mom showed me the biography she wrote when she was a schoolgirl. It was something that she re-read now and again when she was thinking about her life.

More important than that though, in the last months of her life, Mom was writing weekly essays for the Storyworth program. Each week, she received an email with a question about her life and she’d write these amazing essays about her answers. At the end of the process, all of her essays were going to be published in a hardback book.

Mom and I talked in person about a few of these essays on some of the days when I was working from her apartment in early 2021. I had also read a few of Mom’s essays but had fallen a bit behind. Since she died, I haven’t gone back to read them – it just felt too hard. Maybe now is the time I should dive into them and discover which one is my “personal favorite”.