Walker Percy

It’s the birthday of Southern writer Walker Percy (books by this author), born in Birmingham, Alabama (1916). Percy’s early life was marked by tragedy: his grandfather and father both committed suicide with shotguns, and his mother drowned when her car ran off the road into a stream. When his uncle in Greenville, Mississippi, adopted Percy and his little brothers, things took a turn for the better; it was there that he met his lifelong best friend, the neighbor boy Shelby Foote. As teenagers they took a trip to Oxford to meet their hero, William Faulkner — Percy was so overwhelmed that he stayed in the car as Foote and Faulkner talked on the porch... WA

Mom

You’ve been gone for over a year  decade now. I owe you a call.

You always had a hard time with your emotional hard-wiring. I may have inherited traces of that too, at least some of its  behavioral indicators: a manically-heightened sensitivity to the seasons, for one thing. I’ve chosen to exploit the up-side of that disposition, not dwell so much on the SAD, “seasonally-affected, disordered” wintry tendency but try instead to cultivate the happy, energized, springy quality of experience delighting in its own possibilities. Carry the weather with you, as the poet says.  Easier said than done.

Is a mother’s influence mainly via nature or nurture? There was much in your nature that I should be proud to claim a piece of. Stubbornness? No, tenacity. A spontaneous openness to people of very different background and circumstance. An unforced quality of kindness and giving. Much more.

You were a gifted nurturer, by temperament and occupation. When I fell ill at your side at age 12, on our family vacation in Minneapolis, you made me feel ok before I felt better – before hospitalization and emergency surgery. When I fell ill another time, during my first month away at college, you dropped everything in your busy professional nursing life to drive 100 miles and take care of me.  In countless other ways through the years you sacrificed for me, for my sisters, for all of our extended family and for many others. No words of thanks suffice. But thanks. I love you, forever.

For all the Moms in my life: step-Mom, Mom-in-law, wife, friends: please, share the roses.

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Originally published 5.10.09