Legacy

When I was two, my mother fell and hit her head. 

The headaches stayed for a year. She built her calendar around

the dates of such events: illnesses, surgeries, deaths. My brother Neil 

named those pages "the master of disaster calendar." 

I have retained that relic along with her Ladies of Notre Dame directory, 

pale green, rubber-banded, and thick with updates peeled from 

return addresses on envelopes and scraps of paper featuring swashes 

of her inimitable penmanship applying the Palmer Method, her whole arm 

dancing across the page, versus the subsequent default curled squeezing 

of the first two fingers and the thumb around a stalk of ballpoint. 

Aside from such flourishing, my mother's neck and shoulders ached 

from years of performing on the violin. She fell out of love 

with that instrument she replaced with the grand piano, giving her license 

to play and sing at parties, all guests in full voice and smiling the lyrics, 

mirroring her natural smile mine mirrors to this day, as I matched her tone 

on the telephone. Callers would ask when I answered, "Bernadean?" 

And I would respond half proudly, "No, this is Sheila. Here she is."