My Mother’s List

 

Ruth Rodgers Mosier as a student at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana

 

The summer before I left Phoenix and went to Bryn Mawr College, my mother gave me two things:  my first serious wool coat, mail-ordered from Talbots, back East, and a list of books I should have read by that point in my life.

The coat was classic and elegant and perfectly ugly, I thought — my mother’s idea of a Bryn Mawr woman striding purposefully to the library to translate something from ancient Greek.  Of course I had to hate it; I was 17, and still had trouble untangling my mother’s taste and ambition from my own.  Even my decision about college was corrupted by her favor.  Bryn Mawr was my first choice, but first, it was my mother’s choice for me.

The list is three pages long, single-spaced, recorded in my mother’s neat, slanted script.  There’s something old-fashioned about her handwriting; it is guided by the same untroubled faith that allowed her to create a canon for me by consulting no higher authority than the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in our own family room.  She listed the authors alphabetically, leaving no room between their names for debate.  

That day just before I left home for college and forever, my mother stood frowning at the bookshelves, pen and paper in hand.  Watching her, I knew that the list, like my fancy education, was intended to help me surpass her.  I understood, too, that I would never catch up.  I am an avid but turtle-slow reader, unable to comprehend the words on the page without wondering about the person who wrote them or revising the passage in my head.  My mother, by contrast, didn’t read books; she devoured them.  In my memory, she wears an apron over her clothing as she makes her list, as if to protect her business suit from her giant-sized appetite for facts, stories, words.

I find now that I’ve filed the old list under “Resume,” that drop-safe of things I’ve done to enable a writing career or perhaps, at times, to avoid one.  My mother, a successful real estate broker who implored me occasionally to take a job with tangible benefits, used to give me a new business suit every Christmas.  And yet, this same woman also gave me what amounts to her resume in the form of a book list.  As if the true measure of success is not what one has done, but what she has read.

This image of my mother at her bookshelves is almost like religious symbolism to me; I conjure it when I need to ward off a bleaker vision of unread books piling up in warehouses, their jackets torn and bodies remaindered.  Whatever greater fate my mother had in mind for me when she gave me her list, she conveyed to me the hope that the life of a writer is worthwhile.  In that way, she sent me off to school wrapped up in something dignified and durable and better able than that tasteful wool coat to keep out the cold.