A Quote by Simon McBurney
When my mother was dying, I cooked for her. One of the things I realised was that the smell and look of the food was key. I concentrated on how it looked on the plate. Even if the amount was small, it gave her a nourishment of a different kind.
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And when she started becoming a “young lady,” and no one was allowed to look at her because she thought she was fat. And how she really wasn’t fat. And how she was actually very pretty. And how different her face looked when she realized boys thought she was pretty. And how different her face looked the first time she really liked a boy who was not on a poster on her wall. And how her face looked when she realized she was in love with that boy. I wondered how her face would look when she came out from behind those doors.
In my mind, I gave the woman gifts. I gave her a candle stub. I gave her a box of wooden kitchen matches. I gave her a cake of Lifebuoy soap. I gave her a ceilingful of glow-in-the-dark planets. I gave her a bald baby doll. I gave her a ripe fig, sweet as new wood, and a milkdrop from its stem. I gave her a peppermint puff. I gave her a bouquet of four roses. I gave her fat earthworms for her grave. I gave her a fish from Roebuck Lake, a vial of my sweat for it to swim in.
When I looked further into my mother's history, I realised that her anxieties and her neuroses could be accounted for by facts from a very early age. Her parents, William Henry Jones and Sarah Emily, were desperately poor.
The only way my mother's beauty really affected me was that I always assumed that someday I would look like her. Then, late in my teens, I looked at a photo of her when she was younger than I was then, and I realised, no, it's never going to happen.
I am not a historian. I happen to think that the content of my mother's life - her myths, her superstitions, her prayers, the contents of her pantry, the smell of her kitchen, the song that escaped from her sometimes parched lips, her thoughtful repose and pregnant laughter - are all worthy of art.
They'd had fun, for sure. They laughed and enjoyed being together. But if she was painfully honest with herself, something was missing. Something in the way Tim looked at her. She remembered her mom's word. "I saw the way he looked at you...he adores you." Maybe that was it. Tim looked at her on a surface level. He smiled and seemed happy to see her. But When Cody looked at her, there were no layers left, nothing her didn't reveal, nothing he couldn't see. He didn't really look at her so much as he looked into her. To the deepest, most real places in her heart and soul.
Abra DeMadrigal didn't look young enough to be my sister anymore. Her sorrow weighed her down and aged her. She was still beautiful, but she looked very far away. No wonder our people had raven eyes, so distant, so sad. No matter how wise she was, my mother looked like a woman who hadn't truely believed how much evil there was in our world. Not until this moment.
The girl was lighter without her heart. She danced barefoot on the hot roads, and her feet were not cut by the glass or stones that studded her way. She spoke to the dead whenever they visited her. She tried to be kind, but they realised that they no longer had anything in common with her, and she realised it, too. So they went their separate ways.
My mother would never say anything I cooked for her was great. She was always a 'Yeah, but' person. When she tasted my food, I used to say to her 'Don't tell me too straight, lie to me!' She couldn't even understand why I was on television.
When I looked at my mother, I always saw a bit of Ireland. And I suppose when I look to Ireland, I see a bit of my mother - her faith, her wit, her endurance.
And there I was with the stars hanging above my house like live wiresand the night sky the color of stockings. I stuck out my tongue to taste the skybut could not taste. I inhaled deeplybut could not smell. I used to look to the sky for comfortand now there was nothing, not even a seam, and I looked down and saw that it did not even reach the ground. And my only company was the satellites counting their sleep and the Sorrowful Mother swinging her empty dipper in the darkness, the Sorrowful Mother picking her way through the stars over my roof. And I knew I was nowhere and if I ever took my hands from my ears I would fall.
There was a new kind of strength in the gravity of her face, and her colors still gave her that look of deep-seated health and ardor.
My wife's dying upstairs and I can't do anything about it. I look in her face and I see the memories there. I see how I hurt her and how I said the wrong things and how I got angry and how I wasn't the man she hoped I'd be. I see that in her face and I see she's going to die with that. You think I'm not preoccupied?
When my mother first passed away some time ago, I didn't enjoy food anymore. I just ate to live. My mother had always cooked so well that I didn't think I could follow her.
Words of encouragement fan the spark of genius into the flame of achievement. Legend tells us that Lincoln's dying mother called her small son to her bedside and whispered, 'Be somebody, Abe'.
I know also another man who married a widow with several children; and when one of the girls had grown into her teens he insisted on marrying her also, having first by some means won her affections. The mother, however, was much opposed to this marriage, and finally gave up her husband entirely to her daughter; and to this very day the daughter bears children to her stepfather, living as wife in the same house with her mother!
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