remembering my mother

Five years ago, I posted this tribute to my mother, who we lost on December 30, 2006. Thinking of her now (as I often do) and looking back, it seemed most right to share something I have shared before.

There are many memories. But, sometimes, few words.

Today is the anniversary of my mother's passing, and in remembering her, I have gone back to old photographs, to this one, in particular, of my mother, father, older brother, younger sister, and me; that is my mother's white pencil caption, below.  I return to the words I shared during her memorial service.  Lore Kephart passed away four years ago, but she is present, still.

On the morning after the evening that my mother passed away, the sky was sherbet colored—bold and also delicate pinks, upward-rising tangerines, traces of lemon.  It was the sort of sky one only rarely sees in winter—complex and unforgettable and outrageously beautiful—and it was, of course, my mother, at peace at last.

         She had brushed by me, on her way to heaven, the night before—the gentlest knock on my right shoulder.  She had gathered around her, in her final days, so many varieties of kindness in the doctors and the nurses who had come to care for her, so many reminders that goodness, after such sadness, reigns.  She had left behind parts of her to discover still—a note stuck in a bible, a photograph no one remembered taking, the namesake song “Dolores” playing in a nearly empty restaurant.  On the day of my mother’s funeral, a warm breeze blew.  It was her; there is no question.  She wouldn’t leave us lonely.

         Beauty is the art my mother mastered.  For her, orchids kept their angel wings for surpassing months on end.  For her, the mashed potatoes always whipped up right, the gravy thickened, the turkey cut tender to the bone, and anyone who ever had my mother’s chocolate-chip cheesecake was never, in some way, the same.  She made the dresses my sister and I wore as little girls.  She embroidered flowers into our collars.  She filled her house with color, fabric, texture, and light.  With conversation and surprise.  With gifts—abundant, always.

         In the weeks since my mother’s passing, I have been pondering the many measures of a life—that which dissipates, that which remains.  I have been looking up, studying the skies.  I have been watching the greening of the stalk of curly willow that sits in a vase in my most sun-filled room.  I have considered spring’s rumbling things, impatient, even in winter, to rise.  I have been blessed—immeasurably blessed—by the outreach and wisdom of souls like you, and I have made my decision:  Beauty remains. 

In the words she put down on a page, in the friends she gathered around her, in the gifts only she had the talent to give, in the orchids that yet bloom in her deep-silled windows, and in the man who was her husband and is my father, my mother, always a beauty, remains.  Winter will soon cede to spring, and she’ll be here.  The moon will blaze bright through an afternoon haze, the stars won’t leave the sky at dawn, a fox won’t run when you walk by, and in all of this, you’ll find my mother.  And in a garden called Chanticleer, between the risen roots of that most magnificent Katsura tree, there will, come summer, be a stone that reads The Wedge of Sun Between Us.  That stone will be my mother’s stone.  Perhaps she’ll find you there. 

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Three Days to Remember: my mother, my friends, my girls, my seaside, poems, words

Everything about this weekend was perfect.

On Friday evening I joined my father at Villanova University, where my mother was being honored by artist Niko Chocheli. This was shortly after learning that my fabulous nephew has chosen to attend a very fine college not far from my own home. The kind of news any aunt would want to hear.

On Saturday, after writing a Going Over poem for a certain band of students who will be reading this Berlin novel over the summer, I had the immense privilege of visiting Little Flower Catholic High School for Girls on behalf of the first-ever, immaculately well-run Teen Writers Festival. All thanks to Sister Kimberly Miller and K.M. Walton, who organized the day, to the girls who came, to the families who encouraged them, and to my fellow rocking writers. The community strengthens. The friendships grow.

I read, and was deeply moved by, the portraits my own students at Penn created about people who matter to them. Something essential happens when we stop to remember. When we ask. When we listen. When we evoke. History of impressions.

My story about pre-season/post-storm Beach Haven appeared in the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer, sharing a front cover page with Philadelphia's own archbishop, one of those small coincidences that makes a writer smile.

A poem I wrote appeared on Serena Agusto-Cox's blog here, in honor of National Poetry Month.

Words I'd once written about the young adult label were quoted alongside the thoughts of Lauren Oliver and Cornelia Funke in a very interesting New Straits Times story by Samantha Joseph, here. This was the second weekend in which something I'd said in one place was discovered (by Serena Agusto Cox) elsewhere. A week ago, the LA Times quoted me here, in this piece about Gina Frangello.

I received a gorgeous, handwritten (!) letter from Amy Gigi Alexander, a letter written while Amy sat in a cafe in the Petit Square of Tangiers. Amy, I could not be more honored by your words there. Treasured words, which will sit among treasured things.

And finally, but never ever ever finally, Bill and I spent yesterday afternoon with our beloved friends, John and Andra. John Bell was both conducting and directing Meredith Wilson's "The Music Man" at the Labuda Center for the Performing Arts at DeSales University, where John chairs the Performing and Fine Arts Department. It was a rich and wonderful performance. It was a perfect time with two very dear friends.

Today I sit preparing for the launch of Going Over at the Radnor Memorial Library, this coming Wednesday evening, 7:30. I hope you will join us.

Tomorrow I say goodbye to my students. That, my friends, is one of the hardest things I do.

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Lore Kephart Honored by Artist Niko Chocheli at Villanova University

Years ago, my mother met a young artist from the Republic of Georgia and soon believed in—and wholly supported—his dream of becoming a U.S. citizen. That painter, muralist, illustrator, iconographer, and etcher—Niko Chocheli—has since become internationally renowned and his work is now on display in the Villanova University Art Gallery, in an exhibit dedicated to my mother.

The words above tell the story. Chocheli's art has been compared to that of DaVinci, Michelangelo, and Rubens.

It was an honor to go to the opening exhibit this evening with my father, where some of my mother's friends had also gathered.

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Remembering my mother, bright, on her final day

On December 30, 2006, we lost Lore Kephart, my mother. We remember her vitality, her curiosity, her integrity, her ingenious mind, her long laughter, the things she made, baked, wrote. The brightest flowers in the world are not, in fact, bright enough to honor her, but we leave them near her stone—a semblance of her soul.

I found the photograph above at my father's house a week ago. We startled when we saw it. It's the evening of the Wills Eye Hospital grand opening, an event my father had helped make possible by leading the philanthropic effort. My mother looks just like a movie star. She is listening, truly listening, one of her greatest qualities.

We miss you, Mom.

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Notes on her Memory: the greenhouse, photographed in winter

In the Philadelphia Inquirer today, I remember my mother, who is buried at Valley Forge National Historical Park. In the early days following my mother's death, I would wander toward the Knox Estate greenhouse and think about rust and lost seeds. Later, I would come to sit on the bench near my mother's grave, which I had had designed for my father, and listen to the bells that sifted down.

The whole story is here. This is the greenhouse, as photographed in the winter of 2010.

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my mother speaks to me, on my birthday week, about John Bartram High School

My husband, who has found extraordinary happiness working with clay, recently began to clear out our basement to give himself more room to work. Boxes of unnecessary things have been disappearing, leaving more mounds of molting cardboard to be considered or reviewed.

Today, while Bill was showing me his latest sculptural pieces, he pointed to a row of boxes and asked if they were for keeping. I slipped the lid off of one and found, in an instant, a file marked, in my mother's inimitable handwriting: To Betsy on her Birthday 4/1/01.

The file contained a story she'd written while planning her fiftieth high school reunion. Lore Kephart was a proud alum of John Bartram High School in Southwest Philadelphia. She made friendships there that lasted a lifetime. Indeed, my mother's friendships, as I wrote in Into the Tangle of Friendship, were legendary—for their diversity, their longevity, their inherent trustworthiness. My mother was loved.

Now, here today she is, in her own words, talking to me at the end of a long birthday week. Telling me about her born-and-bred Philadelphia self. I hear the cadence of her speech in these inkjet pages. I see her crossing one word out and substituting another in blue ink. She loved to write, my mother. And she loved our birthdays—made them entirely special.

Made this one special, too:

Bartram was notable because of its reputation as a premier school with the highest academic standards. Students allowed to come there from certain other designated neighborhoods always took advantage of it, even though many had to ride a bus or the old #36 trolley, as it was called, to reach the campus. Some even fudged their way in. I was lucky; I walked.

Bartram's teaching staff was an extraordinary source of pride to all of us. To a man and woman, they could have taught anywhere, but chose to travel to Bartram. I often marvel at the completeness of the education I received there. The ghost of Mr. Abner Miller, one of my English teachers, haunts me, lest I should ever end a sentence with a preposition! Teachers were not only entrenched in getting across their individual disciplines—Mr. Wapen's was English, better yet Shakespeare—but they were encouraging as well. One old friend with whom I just caught up told me that, despite the fact that he had gone into the service having attended college for only three semesters, he spent his career interviewing celebrities like Robert Mitchum and Barbra Streisand for the column he wrote for our town's largest newspaper. "It was Mr. Sonnenfeld," he told me. "He just kept on telling me I had this talent."

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remembering my mother on her birthday, with her own words

This is the last photograph I took of my mother.  Just days later she would enter the hospital for what would become an infinitely sad progression of diagnoses.  But here she is, driving with my son, on the day he got his car.  A game front-seat passenger, urging him on, and waving goodbye to me.

Today would have been my mother's birthday.  Today will always be my mother's birthday.  She was a writer, too, and she loved her city, conveyed that love to me.  In honor of her, I yield this blog to her words.  Happy Birthday, Mom.

Southwest Philadelphia was my growing-up place.  It was the kind of community I now tend to think of as reminiscent of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town; there was a pervasive sense of social security intrinsic to the very nature of that neighborhood.  Stability was at the core of community life.  It was enshrined in churches and schools, as well as enduring friends whose longevity even now captures the essence of youthful memories.

            There was the coveted childhood occupation of being personally selected to run an errand to the corner grocery store.  Such an expedition not only netted pocket change, often enough to cover tickets to a Saturday matinee at the Lindy Theater, but also allowed one the no-cost distraction of a pastime known as “dropping in,” a typically Philadelphian pleasure rarely tapped by suburbanites.

            During World War II, families on our street were urged to develop the empty field behind our homes into what eventually became known fondly as “Victory gardens.”  This gave my parents the opportunity to become involved in a project which was not only rewarding but fun.

            Although necessarily molded from the same patterns, rowhouses did not lack individualized interpretation.  People discovered ways of personalizing their homes, and streets were distinguished by the results.  After I was married and moved away, our young children, having become accustomed to the split-level landscape in which they lived, always made a game of finding Grandmom’s house when we visited my parents.  Its boldly painted green sunburst door became a symbol of the loving welcome they always received there.

            Philadelphia, profoundly and affectionately, is a city of neighborhoods, and remnants of neighborhood memories rightly remain to soothe as well as to structure.  An occasional, cogent reminder of their unifying significance casts a welcome, prismatic glow on memories past.

            From “Old neighborhoods revisited,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 26, 1981

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Jill Lepore to Headline the Third Annual Lore Kephart Distinguished Historians Lecture

A week or so ago, when my husband and I were powerless, my father called and invited us to dinner at his home, where my mother's orchids still grow, the figurines still shine, and the sun yet goldens the rooms.  Glimmers of my mother, all.  We were almost finished with this delightful repast (cloth napkins! dimmed lights! smart vegetables! organic cookies!) when my father mentioned that the Villanova University committee entrusted with the selection of a scholar for the Lore Kephart Distinguished Historians Lecture Series had made its decision, and that Jill Lepore was slated to come.  She follows Pulitzer Prize winning James McPherson and the utterly engaging Andrew Bacevich  in this role, and she will appear at the university on the evening of December 6th, details to come.

Jill Lepore happens to be one of my idols. She's not just the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer for The New Yorker.  She's a woman who smiles warmly back at you from her portrait photos, despite the fact that her head is preposterously full of stuff about Charles Dickens and the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin's youngest sister and the Tea Party, eighteenth-century Manhattan and the King Philip's War (she has written or is writing books about it all).  For an apparent change of pace, she's even co-authored a widely acclaimed novel called Blindspot.  And once she wrote a New Yorker piece called "The Lion and the Mouse" (about E.B. White, Stuart Little, and the sometimes ridiculously short-sighted nature of critics and publishing houses) that was so letter perfect I didn't just blog about it here.  I wrote Ms. Lepore a gushing fan letter.  Miraculously, Ms. Lepore wrote back. 

Jill Lepore will be talking about the Tea Party and the Constitution in December.  I'll be providing more details as I can.  For now I'm simply expressing my excitement that my mother and father are working together once again to bring all of us something grander than grand.

My thanks to Paul Steege, a good friend, fine teacher, smart writer, and great soul, who remains a key member of this selection committee.

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Remembering my mother on her birthday

Today I remember my mother on her birthday. Her love of fine fabrics and fashion. Her kitchen artistry. Her green-flecked eyes.

Here she is, outside one of her favorite stores on Walnut Street. My father waits in the reflected glass. I lift my camera to my face.

It is the serenity of this photograph—her serenity—that so appeals to me.

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A dream

Last night I dreamed that my mother came to visit.

I had left the doors unlocked.

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Andrew J. Bacevich to speak on behalf of The Lore Kephart '86 Distinguished Historians Lecture Series

On Monday, September 27, 2010, (7 PM, Connelly Center, Villanova University), Andrew J. Bacevich, PhD, a professor of International Relations and History at Boston University, will speak at the second annual Lore Kephart '86 Distinguished Historians Lecture Series. A graduate of West Point with a PhD in American Diplomatic History from Princeton University, Dr. Bacevich is a "Catholic conservative" and the author of the much-discussed The Limits of Power.  He is also a father who lost his own son, a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army, in action Iraq.

Having titled his talk "Whose Army?" Dr. Bacevich will reflect on civil and military relations in the U.S. since World War II, a talk that will inevitably move Dr. Bacevich toward a question he has recently asked in the press:  "Who is more deserving of contempt? The commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause, however misguided, in which he sincerely believes? Or the commander-in-chief who sends young Americans to die for a cause in which he manifestly does not believe and yet refuses to forsake?"

My mother, in whose memory my father created this lecture series, would have loved the intellectual rigor that Dr. Bacevich will no doubt bring to this talk.  She would have loved knowing that her love of knowing was again bringing so many together.  This morning, in moving through my files in search of an elusive contract, I found instead an essay my mother had written while she was herself a student at Villanova.  Mom received her college degree late in life, but when she set down to academic business, she soared, earning top recognition as a scholar.  "Books are, have been, and always will be jewels of contentment for me," she wrote in the essay I was lucky enough to rediscover this morning.

A legacy passed on, in so many ways.

Please join us for this lecture, which is open to the public.

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Lost Photo

My mother and me, on the occasion of my graduation from the University of Pennsylvania.

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Ghosts in the Garden, an excerpt

One day I took my mother to the garden. It was a warmish day, just us. She made her way slowly down the gentlest decline (holding my arm, sometimes touching tree branches), then chose a bench beneath a tree inside the woods. I sat beside her, and between us fell a triangle of sun. A gardener was at work across the path; people walked by. We sat there peacefully, my mother and I, a wedge of yellow sun between us, but otherwise in shadow. We talked of nothing much, and it was good. We said, every once in a while, Remember this? Remember that? We talked about how the branches of one tree reached toward another and formed an arch. We talked about how high vines will climb if they’re rooted in good soil.

Things were blooming in the Asian Woods.

There was so much color in the shadows.

In the wake of my mother's passing, Chanticleer allowed me to place this stone beneath the great katsura trees, in her memory. Doug was the one who fit the stone to the earth, making sure the sun had room.

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Career Night, Soul Shifts, Small Triumphs

I'll be speaking tonight at the Presbyterian Children's Village about the writer's life, and as I've been finalizing the talk this morning, I've been remembering a moment in Prague, 1995, when the poet Carolyn Forche shifted the tone and urgency of my writerly desires. I thought I'd share the opening paragraphs of the talk here today as well as the poem (previously published in the early days of this blog) that emerged in the wake of that experience.

Before I get to that, though, a few seemingly unrelated things. Last night's lectureship in honor of my mother was, in a word, extraordinary. As a family we had dinner with Dr. James McPherson; we learned and we laughed. Afterward we joined as many as 600 others to hear Dr. McPherson speak of Lincoln's emergence as a military strategist and leader. The night was rich; my father was happy. When we returned from the event, we caught the final moments of the Ken Burns film, "America's Best Idea," that featured my great-grandfather, Horace Kephart—the touching, panning image of the 6,000-plus-foot Great Smoky Mountains peak named in his honor. I am amazed by and grateful to all those who have visited this blog in the aftermath of the segment's screening.

Finally, the image featured in this post today is of my classroom, for English 145 at Penn. I found the students' most recent work in my in-box last evening after all the other glories. They continue to make the teaching exhilarating.

I’ve been writing for most of my life at this point — something I seem not to be able to stop myself from doing (though I’ve tried, believe me, I have). I passionately believe in the promise of stories, I am endlessly seduced by the choreography of language, I don’t go a day without trying to discover or de-puzzle a metaphor. Writing is not just about making a record, or making a claim, or leaving a mark. It is, to begin with, about seeing. It is what forces me to stop and wait, to look and speculate, to inquire and to propose. Writing makes time liquid. It makes of the vague dream a pulsed-through what if?

In the mid-1990s, after I’d published three dozen or so short stories and essays, but before I’d ever published a book, I had the privilege of traveling to Prague and seeing the poet Carolyn Forche read from her work in the dim light of a smoky bar. She was reading, among other things, about Terrence Des Pres, the great essayist and holocaust scholar who had recently died quiet tragically. She was reading, above all else, with conviction, and looking back, I recognize that it was her reading that night that most firmly settled in me the desire to craft work of enduring strength and meaning. This poem captures that shift in my own soul:

On Listening to Carolyn Forche Read Poetry in a Bar in Prague, 1995

Because in Prague I was nothing but wanting

with words and still recovering from new sin,

and because the bar was also dark and lamped

by the yellow of your hair, you made me believe

in the running for the heart of a poem,

the superceded shush between memory and maw.

It was how you read, how you resurrected

Terrence, how the sand in the wind of your words

caught knots into my hair and chafed my skin.

It was how you riddled me almost

clean with possibility.

I was sitting with my son.

I was sitting beside my husband.

You were — may I use the word? — explicit.

In the same way that a stone wall falls

more sensationally than it stands,

in the same way that a rescued love

is made more tender by its damage,

in the same way that women understand beauty

only in its passing, you in the bar in Prague

blew smoke up through the crevices of language.

Smoke the color of angel wings.

Poetry as salvation.

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The Lore Kephart Distinguished Historians Lecture Series

My mother went to college after she had raised the three of us—choosing Villanova as her academic home and remaining an essential fixture on the campus long after she had graduated in the top of her class. She and my father sponsored aspiring historians and contributed to funds. They befriended Villanova scholars and dreams.

Shortly after my mother passed away, my father decided to make her presence at Villanova a permanent one by creating and endowing The Lore Kephart, '86, Distinguished Historians Lecture Series. Working with a team of historians and administrators (including my own dear friend Paul Steege), he has, in her honor, launched what will be an extraordinary yearly lecture, open to the entire community.

Pulitzer Prize winner James McPherson, Ph.D. will give the inaugural lecture—"Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief"—on September 30, 7 PM, in the Villanova Room of the Connelly Center. The George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History, Emeritus, at Princeton, Dr. McPherson won his Pulitzer for Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, a book that went on to sell some 600,000 copies and precipitated a renewed interest in the Civil War. In 1998, Dr. McPherson won the Lincoln Prize for his book, For Cause and Comrades: When Men Fought in the Civil War.

My father, I, and all of the Kepharts hope those of you who live near enough will join us for this evening of celebration and learning. Registration for the free event happens here.

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Remembering my Mother

... In the weeks since my mother’s passing, I have been pondering the many measures of a life—that which dissipates, that which remains. I have been looking up, studying the skies. I have been watching the greening of the stalk of curly willow that sits in a vase in my most sun-filled room. I have considered spring’s rumbling things, impatient, even in winter, to rise. I have been blessed—immeasurably blessed—by the outreach and wisdom of souls like you, and I have made my decision: Beauty remains.

(I have been speaking of how Nothing but Ghosts was inspired, in part, by my mother. These words are from my memorial remarks two-and-a-half years ago.)

(Photos of my mother and father, 1955, and of my mother during her last birthday party at my house.)

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