We Could Have Been So Much More

Teachers were ready for us to learn, but instead, our generation chose to burn

         I saw an old picture of my mother today; she was so beautiful. It was a time-worn candid portrait, the kind that captures something perfectly, totally. She was wearing a gauzy top, like everyone at that time; but hers was like spun clouds, the outline never discerned, only intuited. She was looking toward the burnished-bronze sun; distant shadows in the trees looked cool and damp. She was holding a sunflower in her hands, gazing sadly off across soft fields to a hazy expanse of concrete—so remote from the rest of them, so sad.

         She was still in it for the earth, the water and trees. The others, behind her, were drunks and burnouts that usurped the era as an excuse, not a cause. Everybody was into something back then, had a reason for something: a movement, a protest, a band, a pill. But Mother was only ever into nature, truly connected to it. Maybe that's why none of the others vied for her attention, tried to claim her.

         She wanted to go to them, teach them, show them they were taking the wrong path, losing sight of the revelation they almost had a decade before. Father—before he was father or husband—stopped her gently. Family Apocrypha says he came for her from a hemlock and touched the leaves in her hair. He touched her, lulled her, comforted her for their failures and near-successes. He comforted her, took her, and won her.

         All I am certain of is her picture on the water, that I wish I had known her, that I am like her—watching, but never watched, spirit of the diminishing earth and trees, praying my own satyr will find me in time to woo me away from Mother’s sadness, already settling in my own weary heart.