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I reach for a memory I cannot find.
It's like a ghost of an emotion I cannot grasp. It's a feeling without a specific picture.
I know this sounds strange, but it comes just about any time I see a strip mall lit up in the dark of night.
It's a feeling of warmth. It's a feeling of someone wrapping their arms around my heart. It's security like I seldom feel it.
I've flown into O'Hare Airport in Chicago at night many times. As we descend I see the strip malls below...glowing neon pockets basking in fluorescent. And the feeling comes. It comes every time.
It's my mother. But I'm not completely sure why.
There was a time, a night, it must've been, that I stood out in those lights surrounded by darkness waiting for my mother. It happened more than once, I'd guess.
There was the uneasiness of being a child alone, waiting in the dark, caressed only by the multi-colors of the strip mall.
Maybe I was ten or eleven. Maybe I had finished swimming lessons or some baseball practice.
People would come and go. Strangers adding to the strangeness, elevating for a moment my anxiety. Cars would swing in, my hope would start, but never were they my mom.
Until one is.
She pulls up, I think, and I peer into the comfort and the security of the familiar. I cannot see it, but I feel it.
I open the car door, and plop into the passenger seat next to her.
Everything is okay.
I feel comfort in her simple presence.
My mom died ten years ago this December of Pick's Disease. Pick's is a form of dementia that to the untrained eye seems to mirror Alzheimer's.
She began to deteriorate in her early sixties and died at 71. In her last year she didn't recognize her children.
At her funeral I couldn't watch her being put into the ground.
And yet, here I am, a man of 56.
And her embrace is as sure as if she lives.
Her warmth and security hovering over me like a tender lamp.
That's it isn't it? That's the first priority of parenthood is it not?
To make a child feel safe.
I remember feeling safe.
And the glow of the safety warms my heart...the warmth of that safety moves my soul, the calm of the safety rests my head on a pillow.
My mom comes back to me.
She always did. She always picked me up. She was always there. I had to wait sometimes, but she always showed up.
And I was safe.
I see the lights of the strip mall surrounded by black. I see me there, a child fidgeting.
And where my mind's memory has failed me, my emotion, my soul, my heart will never let go of her embrace.
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