Many of us go rushing through life thinking we should do something important, be someone, and then we die and recycle back into another piece of the whole and what is remembered?

I think of my mom and remember her Angel Food Cake.  No one ever has, or ever will, make one like it. 

I have her recipe and I fail every time I try to make it; so do my daughters.  With her flat, antique whipper she produced it joyfully to the end; partly because I had surpassed her in so many other endeavors as she grew older.

When her hands grew arthritic, the grandchildren did the whipping and under her direction they were prideful and successful. The cake was there when I had a birthday, when my children were born; when I came home after surgery, and always appreciated.

I remember my Dad for wonderful rowboat rides up Curly Creek where he spun extemporaneous stories of the Adventures of Princess Virginia, or recited Shakespeare, Kipling, and Robert Service aloud to any and all who would listen.

I knew the “Quality of Mercy” from “The Merchant of Venice” by heart, long before I could understand its meaning. I remember breakfasts where he starred as the chef, making imaginative pancakes where his thin batter somehow managed to spell out our names or take the form of balls and bats or monsters.

I asked my eldest daughter once what she would remember me for. Without a moment’s hesitation she answered, “For showing me the star in the apple. You taught me to cut the apple the other way so I could find the five pointed star.”

I told her that her father had shown me the star in the apple before she was born, when we were first married. 

My youngest child was birthed after his paternal grandfather had died, yet his older sisters would take their two fingers and walk them up his arms and legs chanting, “Here comes the walking man, the walking man, the walking man,” just like grandpa Scotty had done to them when they were toddlers.

Our son would giggle and squirm with delight unaware of this link with the past, the fact that he was experiencing grandpa’s immortality. Pasternak says it all in “Dr. Zhivago” with one line, “You in others, that is your soul.” 

We are not to choose or ever know what small or great act will live on after we are gone and recycle back into the whole. Perhaps that is the true mystery of life, the meaning of oneness.

And so it goes on and on and on. What we are to each other we will perhaps never really know, but I think the good we do, the joy we produce, the positive, somehow goes on and the rest is eventually forgotten, forgiven, or just weeded out.

By Ruth Scott

Labels: children, life, parents, Ruth Scott

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# posted by Writing Mamas Salon @ 12:01 AM