The letter

Some time before our mother died, back in the winter of 2006, my brother Joe and I sent her to live in a nursing home. We did this reluctantly and not entirely of clear conscience, but we did it nonetheless.

While Joe and I shared responsibility for finding a good home for mom, most of the clerical work fell to me. There were matters pertaining to her debts and to Social Security benefits, a small checking account, insurance and so on, all requiring close attention and resolution.

My best resource in navigating through the necessary legal paperwork was a worn brown folder that mom kept hidden in the bottom of a dresser drawer. In it were things like her birth certificate and my father’s honorable discharge papers from the Army. There was a yellow Western Union telegram from the Vatican in Rome marking their marriage in 1954, the deed to the cemetery plot in Brooklyn where my father had been buried in 1970, along with many other useful and not so useful items. 

Three documents, unrelated to the task at hand, stood out so far from the rest that they literally took my breath away. Each was folded and placed in a separate white envelope and each envelope had a single word written in my mother’s unsteady hand: “Michael,” “Joseph,” and “Ralph.” 

Mom had written each of her three sons a goodbye letter. 

And she didn’t seal the envelopes.

Through tears I managed to read only five words of my mother's letter to me: “You were a beautiful boy.”

The past tense of it all was more than I could bear and so I quickly folded the letter and returned it to the envelope where it belonged. I never told my mother that I'd found the letters, and didn't mention them to my brothers either.

Eighteen months later I finally managed my way through the rest of the letter. It was just after Joe called to say that mom had died. The night nurse had contacted him earlier in the evening to ask that he get to the nursing home as soon as he was able. But soon wasn’t soon enough. Mom died with a very lovely woman by her side but not any of the sons that she had dedicated her life to.

I delivered mom's letters to my brothers just as soon as we were all together. My wife Joan and I had driven down from Maine to New York early the next morning, Mike and his family flew in from Ohio the following day. 

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you guys about this sooner, but I figured this is probably the way she wanted it,” I told my brothers. 

“I only read mine last night,” I assured Joe, “after you called.”

I don’t know when or under what circumstances my brothers read their letters; they didn't read them in front of me. I don't know what mom wrote to them either. We’ve never discussed it. 

I tell myself that that’s okay. What a mother says to her son at the end is only her business and his, nobody else’s.

Mom's letter to me followed the same themes that defined her life: Never let anything or anybody get between you and the family; stay close to your brothers no matter what; be good to people; love one another.

I hope the letters in my brothers' hands are at least a little bit like the one our mother wrote to me. Because it all just sounded so very much like her.

And that's a sound worth hearing. 

Again and again.

Happy Mother's Day everybody!

Mom's left hand

My mother's meatballs brought people together. In a way, they still do.

Cousin John an I were reminiscing just the other day, and when the subject of mom's meatballs came up, as it sometimes will, tears formed in his eyes. John grew up in the apartment right above ours. On Sunday mornings he would come and visit Zia Mary, whose stovetop always overflowed with Sunday Gravy and sausage and braciole and, of course, plenty of meatballs.

"Hey Zia," John would say to my mother, reaching for the plate of fried meatballs as he kissed her cheek. "Mmmm. Love you Zia, you're the best."

John's mother Laura, not unlike all the other women in our family, was a wonderful cook, and made splendid meatballs. And yet my mother's were everybody's favorite. John, after all, wasn't the only one who passed through our kitchen on Sundays. On a slow day, a dozen family members and friends might swing by. More often it was twice that many. We're not talking holidays here, or just every once in a while. This was every Sunday.

I once asked my mother's sister Anna what made mom's meatballs so difficult to replicate. I knew that for decades Anna, Laura, everybody in our family attempted her recipe, to no avail. All my aunt could point to was one thing.

"It was her left hand, we're sure of it," Anna told me. "Nobody else used their left hand to form the meatballs, only your mother. So that has to be it."

We were sitting at her dining room table, sipping coffee and eating Italian cookies that cousin Josephine had made.

"Laura used to get so angry at your mother," my aunt said. "She even used her left hand once, but they still weren't as good. She said your mother must not have given her the whole recipe."

At this point Anna and I began to laugh uncontrollably. After we settled down she went to get another pot of coffee going, but first stopped at my chair and put both hands on my shoulders.

She didn't say a word, but didn't need to.

A mother's memory had brought members of her family together once again.

Happy Mother's Day everybody!

Mom's left hand

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.

— Oscar Wilde

I wouldn't put this one in the bank.

Because long ago, and in a most important way, I became exactly like my own mother. The woman belonged in her kitchen. She was happiest when preparing tradition-rich foods for the people she loved, and most contented when with them at her three-leaf dining table as they ate and drank and gabbed and laughed and sometimes, yes, even cried.

Sound familiar?

I am especially like my mother in the important business of making meatballs. This is a woman so known for her cooking that, two days before leaving for an audience with Pope John Paul II in Rome, no less a person than my trusted associate thought to ask mom if she had planned on bringing the Holy Father a batch of her meatballs. (For the record, she was planning no such thing. "I'm on vacation," she said. "Besides, he has his own cook. Doesn't he?")

My mother and I did not share the same recipe for meatballs (hard to believe, I know) but the seriousness with which I approach the process (seen here) is a very deliberate nod to the woman who reared me.

"Nobody made meatballs like Aunt Mary," my cousin John has said of my mother thousands of times. "I'd give a lot to have just one more Sunday that had her in it — and her meatballs."

It has been alleged — though never by mom — that the secret lay not in a recipe but in her left hand.

"Your mother wasn't a lefty but she was when she made her meatballs," Aunt Laura has told me. "That's why nobody could ever duplicate them; we were all right-handed. You could follow her recipe to the letter but if you weren't able to comfortably form the balls in your left hand it didn't work."

Mom's sister Anna, also a fine maker of meatballs, tells me that many of the women in our family, as well as others outside of it, often studied alongside my mother trying to mirror both her recipe and her technique. To no avail.

"You want a better explanation than the left hand? Well, I don't have one," Aunt Anna tells me. "What do you want from me? My sister had her own way. She always did."

Should you study the details of my own meatball recipe (principally veal whereas mom's was mostly beef) you will see no mention of a left hand, my mother's or mine. That is because a parent's job is to encourage their children to cut their own path, and in this regard my mother must be judged a success.

Still, confident as I might be in my own kitchen, I stand firmly alongside cousin John here:

This coming Sunday, Mother's Day as it happens, would be a whole lot better if mom and her meatballs were around.