Mother's Day 2021

My mother, when she was pregnant with me, can be seen in the color snapshot featured atop this post. She can also be seen (pregnant with me) in the picture directly below.

My mother looks radiant and dad seems happy too, but even after having two more daughters, their marriage fell apart when I was in grade school. He moved out of the house and she was inconsolable.

Perhaps because I'm the eldest child, she turned to me with her heavy heart and everything that was on her mind. For much of the time I felt like I was her mother on many levels.

Baby Robin Makes Me Recall P.D. Eastman!

The image atop this entry is a screen shot of a page from one of my favorite books, Are You My Mother?, which is written and illustrated by P.D. Eastman. Eastman's book cover can seen in the next image (from a Wikipedia page).

The aforementioned Wiki Page explains that Eastman's book tells the "the story about a hatchling bird. His mother, thinking her egg will stay in her nest where she left it, leaves her egg alone and flies off to find food. The baby bird hatches. He does not understand where his mother is so he goes to look for her. In his search, he asks a kitten, a hen, a dog, and a cow if they are his mother. They each say, 'No.'

"Then he (the little baby bird) sees an old car, which cannot be his mother for sure. In desperation, the hatchling calls out to a boat and a plane, and at last, convinced he has found his mother, he climbs onto the teeth of an enormous earth mover. A loud 'SNORT' belches from its exhaust stack, prompting the bird to utter the immortal line, 'You are not my mother! You are a SNORT!' But as it shudders and grinds into motion he cannot escape. 'I want my mother!' he shouts.

"But at this climactic moment, his fate is suddenly reversed. The earth mover drops him back in his nest just as his mother is returning home. The two are united, much to their delight, and the baby bird tells his mother about the adventure he had looking for her."

Eastman's story comes to mind on many occasions whenever I see a baby bird looking around and the other day when I was in Central Park and spotted a baby American robin doing this.

The Coming Week: Recalling November 22nd

I accidentally deleted all the content from this post when in the midst of adding an addendum to it. As soon as I retrieve the content from an archival file, I will update it.