I love paisley and I always have. I think paisley adds a touch of class to nearly anything.

Once, when I was a young girl, I was looking through our family photographs when my eye was drawn to one of the few color photographs in the box. I pulled the picture from the box and studied it closely for a long time.

It is a picture of my mother. She is a young woman. She is wearing a paisley dress, cyan blue, the color of a shallow tropical sea. She is seated deep in a chair with her long athletic legs crossed. She is wearing high heels. Her thick wavy auburn hair contrasts with the vibrant blue green dress in the most resplendent way, in a way that makes you want to look from the dress to her hair and back to the dress again. She is looking confidently into the camera with a sultry “I dare you” expression.

The sexy young woman in the picture is clearly my mother. But not. It seemed implausible to me that this paisley wearing woman was the same woman who nightly rescued me from the dark, pulling me into the safety of her bed, curling me into the soft warm curve of her tummy. My mother never wore high heels or fancy clothes, let alone paisley, and she certainly never sat around looking sultry!

At that moment, I realized that my mother had a life before me and beyond me. It was an odd and uncomfortable thought, almost inconceivable, but at the same time… thrilling. And I think it was then, in that moment, that I fell in love with paisley.

My mother is a smart lady. She could have been anything she wanted to be, she could have worn paisley every day. But she chose to have children instead and through us correct the hurts and injustices of her own childhood.

I don’t actually remember seeing my mother wear that paisley dress, but I remember seeing it hang in the back of her closet year after year.

If she had any regrets about the choices she made for her life, she kept them stashed away in the back of her closet along with the paisley dress. And we never knew it.

Christmas 1961.

Have you ever looked at your child and seen your own face? And maybe your child doesn’t look so much like you, but there is something that he does, some little expression that he makes that is unmistakably yours. And just for a split second, the thread that has stitched all of humanity and history together is brilliant and visible and eternity suddenly makes sense.

Last year, when I was in Illinois visiting my parents, a neighbor brought over some old Super 8 movie footage that had been hiding in a closet for 40 or more years. On it were scenes from a birthday party from when her girls and I were little, maybe four or five years old.

There wasn’t but a few seconds of me on the video, but seeing myself at that age, especially now  that Sean is that same age, was something beyond eerie. It was like watching liquid time being poured out into my cupped hands, spilling over the sides and slipping through my fingers.

In watching myself as a 4-year-old, I realized that like me, Sean wears every emotion on his face — twitches, twists and puckers that telegraph every thought and feeling.

And so I asked God, why did you make him so much like me, unable to hold his cards to his chest?  He will never be able to negotiate a car deal or even a nickel off on a garage sale item.

I thought of that old Super 8 film yesterday as I sat on a park bench, watching Sean as he came barreling down a slide. The wind blew the hair from his face in just the right way and he wore a familiar expression of unfiltered exhilaration. But instead of a boy on a slide, this is what I saw:

A whole lot of time has been poured out since I sat on the hood of the family car with my brother on a windy day in the early 60s and I haven’t been able to hold on to a single drop.

And I haven’t even wanted to.  Until now.

Now, as I sit on a park bench watching a little boy who looks something like me zip down the slide with the wind in his face, I want to catch every drop and drink it up.

When I was five-years-old, my parents and I drove to southern California from Illinois in their light green unairconditioned Oldsmobile. 

I remember quite a bit about being in California and later, the train ride back to Illinois with my mother, but I don’t remember anything at all about the long drive to California except that we stopped and spent the night in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

As a five-year-old, everything about being in Albuquerque was a new and electrifying sensory experience.  Even the name – Albuquerque! — was exotic and lyrical and fun to say.

As I walked with my parents from the motel to a nearby diner I remember that I felt like Dorothy when she woke up and found that the tornado had dropped her house in Oz — I wasn’t in Illinois anymore.  Instead of the familiar horizontal stripes of yellow cornfields and blue sky, this landscape was a hounds tooth pattern of oranges and pinks and browns and other kinds of browns all swirling and mixing together.

While we were eating, a sand storm blew in and when we stepped outside of the diner, hot wind and gritty sand pelted my face and threatened to blow me away.  My dad grabbed one of my hands and my mom the other and then they leaned shoulder into the wind and pressed towards the motel.

As we made our way across the street, each step a staggering effort, a gust of wind blew both of my feet completely out behind me. I clearly remember, at that moment, the sensation of flying.  I remember the feel of the scorching wind slapping my face and the tingling stinging blast of sand on my bare legs and the grainy pixels of desert colors I could see through squinted eyes.

As my feet flew out behind me, I was not afraid of the mighty gritty wind, but exhilarated.  I was fearless.  I knew my parent’s hands that were gentle and comforting were also capable and strong and reliable.  I was secure in the knowledge that neither they nor their grip would fail me.  And because of that I was able to fly without fear, not just in that storm, but in many storms to come.

On the news last night, there was a story of a woman who won a house.  A house! 

A lot of people say, “I never win anything.” I am one of those people who say that.  I never win anything.  Except a pumpkin.  One time I won a pumpkin.

The year was 1969.  It was Friday, October 31^st.  Halloween.  I was a skinny scrawny fourth grader at Our Mother in Perpetual Need of Help Catholic grade school.  The entire month of October, the teacher had a big fat pumpkin sitting on her desk.  Just before the bell rang, she decided to hold a drawing for some “lucky” student to take it home, thus relieving her of the task of disposing of a large and soon-to-be rotting pumpkin come Monday morning. 

You could have knocked me over with a feather when my name was drawn.  I was thrilled!  I had won something!   My nemesis and rival, Erin Flannigan — who was cuter, smarter, had better hair, was more athletic, wore nicer clothes, had a sister and could do just about everything slightly better than me except possibly jump rope — really wanted that pumpkin. But there was no way I was giving it up, especially not to her!  

Intoxicated with the thrill of the win, it did not occur to me that I would have to somehow get that pumpkin home, that I would have to walk nearly a mile schlepping a ginormous pumpkin that weighed not that much less than I did. 

I proudly strode up to the front of the classroom like Miss America to claim my prize.  I was so thrilled.  I slid the orange beauty off the desk and up onto my knee and then I hoisted it up to my tummy, which sent me reeling backwards a few steps. I wrapped my spaghetti arms around my beloved prize and with my back swaying like a pregnant lady, I staggered two or three drunken grapevine steps to the door. Erin made one more generous offer to take the pumpkin off my hands, but I said nothin’ doin’ sister, it’s my pumpkin and I’m keeping it!  And then with trembling knees and sweating brow, my pumpkin and I slowly melted to the ground.

But I remained undaunted for I had won a prize! A pumpkin! 

For the next half mile, I slowly slogged toward home, repeating the knee-lift/hoist/stagger/squat/rest sequence about every ten steps. I was sitting on my pumpkin on the sidewalk resting up for the next sequence, when I saw Paula Vose’s mom zip by in her little VW Bug.  The tail lights turn red.  The car stopped and then whirred back towards me. She rolled down her window. “Wanna ride?” she asked.  God bless Mrs. Vose!  She had mercy on me. I nodded my head vigorously. She got out, put the pumpkin in her car and took me home — a kindness I have never forgotten.

The next day, I noticed the bottom of the pumpkin was beginning to turn black and soggy.  I ceremoniously hauled it out to the burning barrel in the back yard.  I lifted it to the edge of the barrel and with an odd sense of satisfaction, I tipped it in.  It hit the bottom of the barrel with a resounding thud and sent up a cloud of grey ash.  So long prize. And I haven’t won anything since. 

* * * * *

Have you ever won anything? 

Whenever I’ve talked about how that at St. Cabrini, where I attended Catholic grade school, our 4th grade class saved up to buy a pagan baby, I’ve gotten one of two responses.  People who did not attend Catholic school in the 1960s will look at me in stunned silence as though I were from Mars.  People who did attend Catholic school will nod their head knowingly and sigh at the utter absurdity of the notion.

How does a fourth grader go about buying a pagan baby you might wonder?  Well, we brought our scavenged pennies and nickels into school and put them in a jar until we finally had enough to send off for a pagan baby, I guess from the pagan baby store which was probably somewhere in California.  That’s where everything cool was, or at least that’s what mid-western Catholic school kids thought.  If you could get your parents to move to California, then you could automatically be cool.  Anyway, $4 and some box tops later, or something like that, and we were the proud owners of a heathen.  I have no idea how much a pagan baby cost, no one ever told us, and being good Catholic children, we didn’t ask.

Eventually we would get a certificate of some kind in the mail.  The class would vote on a name and afterwards we would have a naming ceremony.  For a baby girl, Sister always pushed us to choose Mary something – Mary Beth, Mary Alice, Mary Margaret, Mary Catherine, Mary Jane, whatever.  The Mary list is endless. For a boy we were expected to choose a name like Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.  But in 1969 the names we fourth graders favored were names like Ringo and Twiggy.

Since it was a class vote with Sister having two votes to our every one, we compromised on Mary Twiggy. We thought it so very funny to exasperate Sister with our zanyness.  As a class, we were supposed to pray for the salvation of little Mary Twiggy throughout the school year. So you see, there was a seed of goodness buried deep deep within such a warped idea.  And somehow?  It made sense at the time.

I wonder what ever became of Mary Twiggy…

Originally published July 2006.