Odd Impulse

Reaching for the Sky – Photo: L. Weikel

I’ve noticed myself having an odd impulse lately and I’m not quite sure what to make of it. It’s probably nothing. But the urge is definitely there, palpable and a little bit strange.

It happened again just this morning.

I was doing the dishes, contemplating life and all its complicated intricacies. Thinking about how long the strictest aspects of this surreal situation will probably need to remain in place. Wondering what parts of our lives will never be the same again.

All of a sudden I caught myself thinking, “I need to call Mommy and see how she’s doing. I wonder what she thinks of all this.” In that moment, I could literally feel and imagine myself speaking to my mother on the phone, each of us marveling at the dramatic shifts in our reality.

An Impossibility

When I realized exactly what I was imagining, I sort of jolted back to this moment in time, my hands once again in the hot, soapy dishwater – not holding the receiver of a telephone. I recalled a similar fleeting sense of being oh-so-close to having a conversation with her having passed over me only a day or so earlier, as well.

The trouble with those fleeting thoughts lay in the fact that my mother passed away in 1991.

Perspective

I’m reminded that she was two years old when the Spanish Flu of 1918 hit our country. Surely she must have heard stories about that horrible event, even though she herself was too young to recall its effects.

And yet I don’t recall hearing even one story about that time in our country’s history.

I wonder: did my grandparents discuss the situation with my aunt and uncle, who were both much older than my mother? Did any of them wear masks when they went outside? Did they make a point to ‘stay at home?’

I wonder if that epidemic influenced my aunt, who was thirteen years old at the time of the 1918 flu, to ultimately major in microbiology and serve in Massachusetts’s public health system.

And how is this global disruption of our lives and the way we interact with each other influencing the strands of destiny of each and every one of us? How weird is it to think that the babies being born right now will never know life without this pandemic as the beginning of a new normal that we have yet to imagine?

Sometimes we just want to talk to our mothers, I guess. And now is one of those times for me.