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The Monday Morning Memo

Feeding Stray Puppies and Kittens

July 21, 2008

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https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/8c16563a-9ef1-461b-bb4a-4a750ba22d6a/MMM080721-FeedingStrays.mp3

Mom’s off-white Formica table with wobbly metal legs had a charred circle on top where I once set a pan that was way too hot. Mom couldn’t afford a tablecloth to cover it, but whenever she suspected a person might have nowhere to go for Thanksgiving dinner, she’d always invite them to our house and have another hungry mouth to feed.

Thanksgiving, for me, meant a house jammed with people I’d never seen before and would never see again. But each year I saw a whole other America through the eyes of the misfits who gathered around my charred little circle. And the stories I heard were amazing. It was magical.

I miss those days.

I watched Mom deny herself necessities during the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. Her emaciated paycheck couldn’t possibly feed a houseful of strangers, but she always did it anyway. And no guest ever had to worry they were taking more than their share. Mom’s opulence made us believe, at least for an hour, that we were royal.

What I’ve written is the sort of thing a person usually writes when someone they love has died, but I’m delighted to report that Mom is alive and healthy and recently returned from a trip to China.

I’m telling you about Sue Williams today because she taught me something else when I was young. She said we should give our roses to the living and not save them for the dead.

“When a person dies, everyone who loved them will cancel their other obligations, send a big bouquet of flowers, jump on an airplane and fly across the country to look at their dead friend in a box.” Mom waited a moment for this to soak in. “If I’m going to cancel my plans, buy roses and travel because of friendship, I’m going to do it while my friend is alive to smell the flowers and enjoy the adventure with me. And if my friend passes before I do, I'll sit quietly at home and remember the trip we took together.”

Once a year, Mom would treat a friend to a small adventure, a 3 or 4-day trip together to someplace interesting. Taos with Theresa. Santa Fe with Dee. A trip to Alaska to see Janice. West Virgina to see Velma. A trip to the Bahamas with Vicki. Spain with Cindy. These are the people my Mom cares about too much to attend their funerals.

Stephen Levine poses a very interesting question: “If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?”

I’ve borrowed Stephen’s question for our weekly e-Poll.  Your answer, when approved, will appear at the bottom of today’s Memo in the archives at MondayMorningMemo.com. (Approval usually happens within a few hours.)

So tell us, who would you call?

Roy H. Williams

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“You say I have deeds but you have love. Show me your love without deeds and I’ll show you my love by my deeds.” – transliteration from the book of James, chapter 2

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Random Quote:

“I have quoted from the Bible and have told you that I used to be a newspaper man. Why are those two things important, and how are they linked? Many years ago I was reading a biography of one of my literary heroes, the great Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, and I learned that when he was asked by an admirer—I think it was Edmund Gosse—what he read that underlay his extraordinary perception of life, he replied that he read nothing but the Bible and the newspapers. Gosse saw a well-worn Bible in the great man’s workroom, and it was known that every day of his life in Oslo, Ibsen dressed himself impeccably, walked to his favourite restaurant, and sat at his favourite table in a corner; and there all the day’s newspapers were brought to him and he sat for two hours, drinking aquavit, and reading, and peeping over his paper at the other diners. He read all the papers from end to end, including the advertisements, and he read not only the serious dailies but also the comic papers.

It was here that he gained his profound and wide-ranging insight into human life, it was here that he found his plots, and when he went home he identified what he had read in the daily news with what had been written so long ago by those Hebrew chroniclers, and found the same stories about the three great subjects of all literature—Love, War, and Death.”

- Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart, p. 354

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