Pregnancy
What My Mother Taught Me
by Bill Donahue
In a Connecticut suburb of golf courses and swimming pools and little boutiques with names like "Tweeds and Tees," my mother was, to my recollection, the only grownup to oppose the Vietnam war. She knew all the secret places--the cool sliver of a cave where Will Warren, the eighteenth-century sheep thief, hid out, and the chimneys and closets in which runaway slaves had crouched as they traveled north on the Underground Railroad. She taught us how to make sumac juice--awful stuff, really--from the scrappy cluster of trees by our brook and, when I was four or five and I slathered my clothes and hands and face with thick, clayey mud, she recited the e.e. cummings poem that begins, "in Just -spring when the world is mudluscious."
The year we all went mad for distance running, she let us skip school, and drove me to Boston, for the marathon. "Never let your schooling get in the way of education," she quipped, quoting Mark Twain. I watched the finish from high up in a wobbly tree and, on the drive home, it poured. Rain came down in sheets, pelting the roof of the car, and my mother drove on--leaned forward, peering through the glaze on the window. After a while, I think she realized that this was absurd. She stopped, and we sat there on the side of the highway quietly watching the deluge. My mother, me, and my friend, David Nye. Finally, David spoke. "My mother," he said, "would never have driven in a rain storm like this."
