In the long, appalling history of woe mine barely makes the needle jig; but it is mine nonetheless.
I remember my mother, crying, suitcase in hand, flying out the front door and down the stairs of the porch where I was playing with my two brothers. We stopped mid-play, wailed or muttered some half–formed words I don’t recall.
The wind wrapped her long black coat around her and whipped her hair into spastic commas.
I never saw her again.
That’s hard cheese when you’re five.
There’s more to the story of course, but that’s a tale for another time and speaks of an angry, abusive husband with a tenuous grasp of the truth and an arrogant, unfounded sense of self-worth.
About nine or ten years later we heard that she had put a bullet through her head. Hard cheese indeed.
And then in 1972 when Paul Simon released “Mother and Child Reunion” it struck a chord and brought me to trembling weepery on more than one occasion.
So imagine my chagrin when I learned:
QUOTE – PAUL SIMON
“Know where the words came from on that? You would never have guessed. I was eating in a Chinese restaurant downtown. There was a dish called “Mother and Child Reunion.” It’s chicken and eggs. And I said, “Oh, I love that title. I gotta use that one.”
I laughed my fucking ass off.
