August 12, 2025. 93 degrees.

I wrote this two Junes ago.

My mother didn’t seem afraid of much. Then again, maybe she was afraid of everything. She certainly feared rejection. Certainly she feared a few of my father’s moods. Dying. She could snap and crackle with leonine brassiness easily mistaken for confidence. She bossed people around, refused to seek out permission for things. Again, looked like confidence and maybe it was. Inside, I know she often yearned to be accepted and loved and felt that she wasn’t. Or at least, not enough. That’s a wound that competes with confidence.

But don’t get me wrong. (Don’t get me wrong is a thing I might’ve said to her as I equivocated in true middle-child fashion, a stance easily mistaken for the absence of confidence).

Don’t get me wrong: a sure hand informed a lot of her life. Design: boom she had it. That indefinable thing we call taste. Instincts: bam. She trusted her gut. She trusted her gut and couldn’t understand why I didn’t. She could read people and was often right about them in a way that made me temporarily hate her.

She knew how to teach. She knew how to teach those with talent spilling out of their pockets. She knew how to see talent in those who kept it under lock and key. She knew how to teach troublemakers and nerds alike. It made her powerful in a certain realm, beloved, even. Yes, she was beloved in the art room, but not the teachers’ lounge where her constant smoking bothered some and her guttural smoker’s laugh was often laced with contempt.

In spite of a certain penchant for being stubborn and opinionated like my mother, I am more my father’s daughter. I share his love of solitude, his appreciation for an argument well-made. For most of my life, he was an atheist. I consider myself agnostic.

He’d been an altar boy growing up in Queens. His mother had swished her nylon-encased stout legs to Mass every morning. I remember the rosary beads dangling from her hands. You’d think after growing up like that it might have been a bigger deal giving it up but it didn’t seem that way. When my father stopped going to Mass, it was as if he took off an ill-fitting jacket and let it drop to the floor. Shrug. That was it.

He elevated science. The planets in their travels, for instance, were elegant and enduring symbols of a different kind of holiness. He bought a telescope and showed us kids Jupiter’s red spot, the moon’s shadowy craters. Mathematics satisfied him too. How many times in helping me with advanced algebra did he say, “let X equal” and how predictably did I groan because I got that part and wanted him to go faster. But no. Math is nothing if not taking things in order.

His sacraments? Walking through the woods. Fishing.

He didn’t understand why I cared so much about what other people thought, which was maybe his way of saying: trust yourself, trust your thoughts, your perceptions. Trust your ability to walk away from things.

My mother said, You worry too much. I didn’t think I worried too much. I thought I didn’t worry precisely enough. Imagine worrying about your worry.

My father left early. My mother did too, but 14 years later. One son met her, neither son met him.

Yesterday, a guest on a news program reminded me a little of my father – clear blue eyes, aquiline nose, a slight spray of freckles. I happened to be sitting with my brother and said so. He shrugged. Oh come on I insisted put glasses on him and you’d see it.

Nobody in my family really resembles anyone else. Or not for long anyway. My sister and I perhaps sounded alike but that’s it. My maternal grandfather mistook me for his middle daughter right before his death, but I was ten and changed a lot afterwards. My brother got that same grandfather’s nose, but no one got my father’s long, narrow one or my mother’s underbite.

It’s funny how that goes. When one of my boys was younger he could go in a flash from looking like his own father to resembling mine. Now he is only his own self, which of course is the best way to be.

All this talk of parents and children can’t help but make me feel urgent about time. How little perhaps is left.