Today, if my mother was alive, she’d be 86 and in her 27^th year of endometrial cancer.   That’s just bookkeeping, mere facts, a logical and stupid way to begin.

One year we flew to Florida on May 20th, Sekhnet and I, and rented a car at the airport.   We drove to my parents’ gated retirement community and somehow gained entrance without having the gate call the residents to verify that we were not smiling predators posing as children and coming to kill and rob the condo owners.

We arrived and parked at the far end of their parking lot, out of sight of their windows.   I dialed my parents as we walked up to the apartment and Sekhnet and I wished a hearty happy birthday and expressed our regrets that we couldn’t be there to celebrate in person.  Then we rang the doorbell.

“Goddamn it,” my mother said, with her ready Bronx attitude of frustration at an interruption, “somebody’s at the door….”

When she opened it we were standing there, phone in hand.

Her mouth popped wide open in the most comical expression of surprise you can imagine.   Although her mouth was open wide enough to swallow a small dog, she had a wry Bill Maherish smile around the edges of it, and in her eyes.  She looked for a moment like one of those nutcrackers in the shape of a person with the impossibly open lower jaw.   I can see that expression now, so can Sekhnet.

My mother began to laugh “you rats!” she said, hugging and kissing us.    My father appeared behind her, making humorous, sardonic remarks.   Ginger, a small poodle shaped like a football, began clicking her claws on the hard wood floor by the door.

All of them now long gone;  my father nine years, Ginger the same, my mother will be gone four years tomorrow.

I pause today to think of how proud my parents would be, even if terribly concerned about my long-term survival, to see the progress of my program, and my determination.   They would not be any more excited about the actual animation than anyone else is, but I think they would understand that their son, long struggling against a world of darkness, brutality and ignorance, has found a way to bring the things he values most into the lives of children who get very little chance to ever experience these things.   I think my mother would be proud, and excited for the possibilities immediately before me, now that I have proved the success of this program with perhaps 100 kids in four or five different settings.  

Even if she didn’t have much faith in my prospects for the future, she would listen willing to be convinced that I have already done much of the hard work to produce something amazing.   “Elie, you’re not curing cancer, but this is pretty good,” she might agree, when I was done persuading her of the great value of what I am doing and how much satisfaction it brings me, in the midst of the fearfulness of this wholly invented, marvelous and scarily shaky vehicle I am dragging around with me.

Happy birthday, Mom.