April 21st

When I was a kid, I was intrigued by the fact that Mom had grown up in China. I was even more interested that her sister June had actually been born in China, and would ask her time to time: “Does that mean that Aunt June is Chinese?” It was a running joke, and her answer was always the same: “If a cat were born in an oven, would it be a biscuit?”


I loved looking at Granddad’s photos of Mom and Aunt June from China. There weren’t many, and the ones we did have were tossed into a cardboard shoebox, willy-nilly and undated. I recall one of her with her amah, but the pictures didn’t give any real sense of what their house looked like, or their town. And Mom’s memories of China were pretty gauzy, because I think they came back to the states for good when she was about ten.


She had sharper memories of the family’s return to the states, and I loved hearing about their drive through Arizona’s Painted Desert. It was so hot, she said, that she and her sister wore nothing but their underwear day and night and slept under the desert sky. She also talked about the Petrified Forest, where very old trees had turned to steel. Since I had no idea what the Painted Desert really looked like, I pictured it drenched in oranges and purples, with immense saguaro cactuses, and the Petrified Forest had a prehistoric metallic glow to it. There were no real roads to speak of. This road trip from California to Michigan probably didn’t take all that long, but in my mind it took months and months through unpopulated regions.


Mom was born the same day as Queen Elizabeth II of England, April 21st, and when she was a teenager she wrote a letter to the princess telling her that they shared a birthday. She apparently got a letter back, though that letter must have been lost.
Mom used to always say that she wanted to see the turn of the century, which had she lived would have happened in her 77th year. She fell a few years short. If she were still alive, she would be 85 on Monday.