Article content continued

That’s my mom. No trouble. Lots of fun. She doesn’t complain, except sometimes, and then she has her reasons — and always feels guilty about it. She seriously loves her children. She likes to have a glass of wine, and to play practical jokes, and is hospitable to a fault. There are always three meals prepared for guests at my mother’s house, or her cabin, or even when she’s visiting. It’s easy to feel welcome when visiting her. This is a remarkable and underappreciated attribute. It’s much less common than it once was, now that so much resentment appears to have built up in the kitchen and the domestic sphere, where the increasingly common warfare between men and women and their respective duties means that the basic tasks of hospitality have been abandoned, where mealtimes are no longer collective acts of celebration, and where people are chronically preoccupied with their individual electronic addictive social hells. I can’t help but think that something crucial has been lost in the hunger for career and social accomplishment. But maybe that’s just sentimentality, as I consider this birthday and its significance.

She’s no damn victim, my mother, and does what she can, with conscious intent, to make the best of what is sometimes a difficult lot

For now my mother, Beverley Anne Peterson, is 80. That’s just not young, no matter how you slice it. Her older sister, Joan, passed away a couple of weeks ago, after a dreadful bout with Alzheimer’s (the same disease that took her mother, with equal horror.) Her older brother, Earl, is showing some signs of cognitive decline and even Margaret, five years younger, has had some heart trouble. Many of her friends have died, and a larger number of them are in nursing homes, where they are starting to be truly old. Some no longer recognize her. It’s no picnic to get old. The world defies your hard-earned expectations. Your culture disappears. Your friends vanish. You lose your hearing (she’s a bit deaf now), and sometimes your sight (she’s fortunate there) and your mobility (no problems there, either, perhaps because of her habit of daily walking) and maybe a lot more than that. But she manages it all with amazing grace, volunteering at the old folk’s home in her home town, maintaining an active social life with the friends she has left, as well as new ones she has cultivated, and travelling, a lot. She’s no damn victim, my mother, and does what she can, with conscious intent, to make the best of what is sometimes a difficult lot.

My Mom is a very good person. She’s nonplussed by her age; surprised that it arrived so soon. She still feels like she did when she was, say, 30 or 40, and can’t believe that the time has been so evanescent and vanished so rapidly. I love her a lot; I like her, too. She’s been a very good friend to me. So, here’s to you, Mom. Happy Birthday. I hope that God shines His grace on you for the next years of your life. I hope that I get to see you for some more good summers. May your spirit stay young and untrammelled. May you have as many more birthdays as you want; that they are mercifully delivered.