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A turquoise silk scarf, elegantly long, and narrow; so delicately threaded with pale gold and silver butterflies, you might lose yourself in a dream contemplating it, imagining you're gazing into another dimension or another time in which the heraldic butterflies are living creatures with slow, pulsing wings.
Eleven years old, I was searching for a birthday present for my mother. Mom she was to me though often in weak moments I'd hear my voice cry Mommy.
It was a windy grit-borne Saturday in late March, a week before Easter, and cold. Searching through the stores of downtown Strykersville. Not Woolworth's, not Rexall's Drugs, not Norban's Discounts where a gang of girls might prowl after school but the "better" women's stores where few of us went except with our mothers, and rarely even then.
Saved jealously, in secret, for many months in a bunched-up white sock in my bureau drawer was eight dollars and sixty-five cents. Now in my jacket pocket, the bills carefully folded. This sum was sufficient, I believed, for a really nice, really special present for my mother. I was excited, nervous; already I could see the surprised pleasure in my mother's eyes as she unwrapped the box, and this was to be my reward. For there was a delicious way Mom had of squinching up her face, which was an unlined, pretty face, a young-woman face still (my parents' ages were mysteries to me I would not have dared to penetrate but clearly they were "young" compared with most of my friends' parents-in their early thirties) and saying, in her warm whispery voice, as if this were a secret between us, "Oh, honey, what have you done!"
I wanted to strike that match bringing out a warm startled glow in my mother's face, that glisten in her eyes.
I wanted to present my mother with, not a mere store-bought item, but a love offering. A talisman against harm. The perfect gift that was a spell against hurt, fear, aloneness; sorrow, illness, age and death and oblivion. The gift that says, I love you, you are life to me.
Had I eighteen dollars, or eighty, I might have wished to spend every penny on this gift for my mother's birthday. To hand...