In her latter years, my mother used to ask that a lot. I never knew what  to say, so I usually said something trite like “We still need you here.”  At which she would click her tongue against her teeth the way she did when I disagreed with her politics.
What was she asking, I wondered. Â Did she still dream of unrealized ambitions in her nineties? Â I always found the question unsettling and frankly, a little annoying.
But now that there are many more birthdays behind than before me, I think I get it.  I think she was reflecting over her long life and trying to make sense of it.  And I find myself doing the same.   What has my life meant?  At the finish line, will I be able to say I have   “fought the good fight” ?   Did I miss my “calling,” my high purpose?  The olympic swimmer,  the nuns of Calcutta, the Nobel Laureate, the musical prodigy;  they had a calling, didn’t they?  A custom made life-suit,  into which they fit perfectly.  Their one true path.  Is there one for me?
In my early life, I was sure of it.   My life would be exciting, full of high purpose, awe-inspiring.   Unlike my mother’s.  Especially, not like my mother’s.
Mind you, my mother  was not a slacker. She was a strong and intelligent woman; a school teacher, an avid reader, a seamstress and amazing gardener.  She make great chicken and dumplings and rhubarb pie. She survived two husbands and lived independently for 92+ of her 93 years.
But.  She never wrote a book, climbed a mountain, ran a corporation (or a marathon)  or held public office.  For most of her life she lived in the same community.  To my impatient, arrogant 18-year-old eyes, her life looked mundane,  aimless, pointless even.  Not mine, I vowed.  I would  set goals for myself and go about achieving them.  Simple as that.
But it didn’t quite work out that way.  My path took unexpected twists and  turns.   It didn’t  lead steadily  to a noble destination, but instead  wound  through brambles, tangled ravines and rocky boulders.  I ran, I  stumbled,  I climbed, I  tripped,  I fell and I recovered,  with varying degrees of grace.
Admittedly, on its surface,  my life looks radically different from that of my mother.  I left home at an early age, attended  universities in distant states,  managed a demanding career,  travelled the world; accumulated a modicum of recognition for my work.  But at its core,  like my mother’s, my life was made of the usual stuff;  education, career, marriage, children, retirement.  And my path, like hers, was not the work of destiny, but the result of choices.
And  my path has  led me…. here. Not to a mountaintop and not to a swamp.  As it did my mother.
It’s tempting to  fall for the “one true thing”  pitch.  The idea that  we are  entitled to  the one true love, the one perfect career, the one true happily-ever-after is very appealing.  And perhaps it is true for some.  But my life didn’t  come with a blueprint; I made choices, sometimes wisely, sometimes foolishly, that in the aggregate defined my path.  I wasn’t always sure of my choices,  and  they didn’t always lead to the mountaintop.
If I could answer my mother  now, I would reassure her that she didn’t miss her calling.  Like me, she simply made choices that led her to her destination.  And  at the end of the day, it was not our accomplishments, as my teenage self thought,  but the accumulation of our everyday thoughts and actions that defined us. Both of us.
Turns out, though,  there really is a logical explanation for the egg-bearing  bunny.   According to Wikipedia, German Lutherans  apparently established the tradition of the “Easter Hare.”
And as for the eggs, early churches abstained from them during Lent.  And lacking refrigeration, the only way to keep them from spoiling was to boil them so they could eat them after the fast was ended.  And  they probably decorated them as part of the celebration.  So that explains a lot.
I tried to tell Miss Julianne it wouldn’t work. Jimmy don’t have the sense God gave a billygoat. But he begged and whined and went on until she let him try it out at the  rehearsal.
 she doesn’t even have to use a perm.  She was wearing blue jeans and her husband Ronnie’s old work shirt.  Anyone else would have looked like a hobo, but she looked beautiful.
be the best part of the pageant.  You’ll see!”
The night of the pageant it was cold and sleeting. I had prayed for snow, but just like when I prayed my dog Pepper would get well, it didn’t happen. Mama says the Bible tells us “Ask and ye shall receive,†but so far that’s not working for me. I must be doing something wrong. One day I’ll ask Miss Julianne about it.
how pretty she looked. She had on a  white dress with lace ruffles on the bottom lace on the sleeves with white satin slippers to match and was carrying a stupid wand, like she was a fairy godmother instead of an angel, going around tapping everyone on the head and cooing, “Bless you, bless you.” I thought I would throw up. I pushed my way  over to the corner where Miss Julianne and Mr. Ronnie was 
helping the little kids into their sheep costumes. The sheep part is the worst because you have to crawl around in a boiling hot costume.  They always give that to the little kids.   They think it’s fun, they don’t know everyone’s laughing at them.
rubbed off on your hands.
smoke.  I glanced at office clock on the wall above me. It read 12:18 PM.
marriage. But I was young and naive. I didn’t know that I deserved respect.  In my warped perspective, I saw all the abuse in my life as a challenge. I fancied myself some kind of superwoman.
disbelief, the only sound the click of the second hand on the office clock.  Suzanne, at the desk ahead finally broke the silence in a quavering voice, “Mr. Stevens, are you sure? I mean…Shot?!â€
 Drawn by the excitement, people from nearby offices crowded the door, anxious whispers of “What’s going on? What? What happened?†mingled with sobs and murmurs of those inside.  I stood in stunned silence.  My hand went to my mouth to stifle a scream too deep to surface.  Suzanne began to weep.  Evelyn warily observed Lawler Stevens’ increasing discomfort with the show of emotion. A blush of red began spreading over his face. He motioned Evelyn over.
represents for me the first crack in the facade of  national  innocence.   But it was only a crack. We clung to our fragile illusion; we wanted to believe it. It was so much easier to believe that truth is either black or white than to bother with the shifting grey shades of reality. We wanted to believe that good people who play by the rules will always win, and that bad people, and only bad people will be tracked down and punished. We wanted; we thought we had, a “Gunsmoke†kind of world.
soon, other wrenching losses followed on our heartbreaking journey to our national  loss of innocence.
generous, greedy,  intellectually gifted and psychotic, industrious, and lazy; like people everywhere.  With one major exception: We needed each other.  No one had to tell us that.   We knew it by birth;  we were a poor farming community; if we were to survive, it meant cooperation.  It meant community.  In our case, a community formed around a church.
triggers a  rotation of members to supply food and housekeeping.   Extra rows are planted in  gardens for needy members.  The list goes on.  And this is why such a photo could never have been, never will be,  taken in that community.
delight of  learning to translate the symbols on the page into words that conjured fantastical thoughts, faraway places, exciting ideas.  I find comfort in bookshops and libraries.  I love being surrounded by books and by people who love books.
blocks of time daily to write, regardless of how inappropriate,  to write anything at all, no matter how nonsensical and vapid,  in order to attain my daily  “word count”.  Oddly, there is little in this daily digital tirade about the art of reading or the craft of writing.  I wonder what Mark Twain’s  reaction would be.  Somehow I don’t see him worrying about his Twitter account.