Point of View: Thinking of Them

The Day of the Dead was lively and bright. The sun streamed through the trees in the early morning, and in the afternoon it was so warm that the tennis lesson to which I’d taken our granddaughter was held outside. I couldn’t recall a First of November being so gentle.

The next day, drizzly and drear, was more fitting for remembering; the treats of the night before having traditionally assured that those who showed up at the door would, in return for “soul cakes,” pray for the donors’ dead.

Filial piety is not such a bad thing in which to engage every now and then in these heedless days. I am partly an amalgam of four parents (make that five if you include Mary’s mother), all of whom did the best they could, and all of whom remain pretty vivid within. 

I can become crowded when all are speaking at once — two fathers conservative, though one more forgiving of human foibles, a mother more tender, though no one’s pushover, one lighthearted, yet steely . . . I hear all their voices. 

And I try not to misrepresent them when I’m writing, though I’ll allow, given my flippant bent, that I have. 

As a group I remember them too: the love they had for one another, beacons to us. It was the second time around in my mother and stepmother’s cases, the first time around in the case of my stepfather, the fifth time around in the case of my father, and all the marriages ended happily. 

Everything, as my stepmother, who was French, used to say, arranged itself. “Tout s’arrange.” 

Those words, I think, are the ones Mary and I most use when we discuss thorny problems. As well as “GOOOOD GOD!” An exclamation my stepfather, whose moral rectitude was practically infamous, would often spit forth. 

“Everyone does the best they can,” my father would often say, to wit, that we are all of us forgiven, and ought to forgive ourselves. 

I still think of my mother when I dry between my toes. And the Bible she gave me has only partly been read. I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it. 

She said once we were on different wavelengths, but waves can bend toward one another, can’t they?

It’s drizzly and drear, though the sun is streaming through the trees as I think of them.