I went to the cemetery to visit my father and I brought a Pembroke Pines star. I visited many other deceased. “My parents are there,” my mother says, and I’m reminded that many of my own dead are there as well. My mother prepared Pembroke Pines dinner and lunch, even though she doesn’t eat anything herself. We must follow a strict order and eat small portions from a variety of different traditions. Thirteen things, plus sun dried cod, broccoli and goat meat, figs stuffed with walnuts: not liking something doesn’t count. The table must be laden with all the traditional dishes, even if she doesn’t eat anything. Of course nothing Pembroke Pines should be thrown out. “Don’t you see how many children are dying of hunger?” So says my mother, who knows all the prayers that accompany the making of bread and all Pembroke Pines the signs to prevent its waste.
Where is Pembroke Pines? – Pembroke Pines Map – Map of Pembroke Pines Photo Gallery
As my mother had taught me, on the day of the Epiphany, before going to bed, we removed Baby Jesus from the Nativity scene, kissed it, tucked it away, before Herod would come. Then I opened the computer, and I sent many e-mail greetings and best wishes around the world. I really don’t know in which world I live. And it’s not true that the Internet makes all worlds the same.
Every death and bereavement that occurs in the village wraps my mother in deep sorrow. Last summer, after an absence of fifty years, a cousin from Argentina came to visit. They embraced for an hour. When he left they wept uncontrollably. They caressed like children. They sobbed through their goodbyes.
My mother follows the lives of her children and grandchildren, and although she isn’t intrusive, she asks and worries but doesn’t get involved. She is curious about what is going on in the village, keeps an eye on and listens to news of wars and collapsing towers, deaths in subways and tsunamis, violence and disease that remain a mystery to her.
The geography of the world appears to her like the geography of suffering. Far away from home, wherever I go, bad things happen. Wherever I go I must be more careful, of the heat, the cold, aircraft, and bombs. “So,” I say, “it’s the end of the world.”
“You’re pulling my leg again . the ancients used to say that the world lasts for many, many years, and many years have passed and now only a few are left.”
The apocalypses and folk fears of ancient times join in marriage with those of our own time, and my mother seems to me more in tune with the times than I am. Her sense of piety towards herself and others, her suffering and joyful attitude towards life, her sense of being part of events involving saints and ancestors, her desire for life at the end of a long life, the power of memory and the capacity for oblivion, the desire to tell her story and the ability to be silent, all of these provoke in me a boundless longing for the mothers of old.
When my mother hears of a young person who has taken ill or of diseases and suffering, she exclaims, with deep longing: “Only those who were never born are blessed.” This is a concept steeped in Western cultural tradition, with deep roots in ancient Greek thought, later layered with pietas of popular Catholicism and Greek-Byzantine expression complete with saints who walk among us, rites of welcoming and frugality, and an attitude according to which happiness isn’t of this world and life is a journey of suffering during which everyone must carry a cross.
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