One summer, some years ago, I was called back to Illinois for a few weeks to help Mother pack up and move out of the old house—a rambling, three-story job on a tree-lined street near the university. Since I’d moved away, I’d rarely spent more than a long weekend in my hometown—at the holidays, a visit for her birthday or Mother’s Day. For me, it was a place stuck in time. I’d left it long ago and now lived another kind of life out on the West Coast, a life that had seduced me as a young man but for some time now had seemed to merely tolerate my presence.
Giving up the old house was a melancholy task, but maintaining the place had become for Mother a worse kind of chore. Neither of us was looking forward to it, but the time had come to move her into the smaller, more manageable condo she’d picked out for herself in an upscale area near the new
hospital, an area where many of the university’s emeriti had settled.
Mother has always been well-informed about local matters. She reads the paper each morning from front to back and knows every small-town scandal. Though retired, she still enjoys attending university functions and events at the Unitarian Church—partly for the free white wine and the canapés, but mostly for the fountains of gossip.
We were in the attic packing up some things of mine from high school. Mother was paging through my senior yearbook, pointing at little square black-and-white photos of classmates I barely remember, and giving me detailed, sometimes lurid updates on the members of the Class of ’76 who still lived in town—colorful tales about their children, their divorces, their afflictions, their accidents and crimes. […]
