My Maine in-laws were also part of America’s 1960s counterculture. With their own four hands they added a seemingly infinite and charmingly whimsical labyrinth of rooms to an august old farmhouse in the woods. Not only the four children they raised there but everyone on the planet, most assuredly including your truly, feels at home there. When I’m not there, Gaye (my son in-law’s mother) delights me with email:
Of Spring and Reunion by Gaye Bussey
I guess it’s spring…temperatures inching up to the 40s by noon! One of the Kathys (there are several of them around here) and I made a field trip to the big plant nursery last week. Signs in front of each table of baby plants said: “Too cold. Do not plant outside yet.”
I think neighbor Janet is feeling better; she was still recovering from hip replacement when she first returned and was pretty cranky. Her son is, at the moment, living in his place on the family’s big hunk of land, another happy making thing. Janet mentioned that they happened to meet up on one of the wood’s paths to the mailbox, and that tripped a memory of the Paul Simon song “Mother and Child Reunion.” Thinking about how reunions don’t have to be momentous post-Titanic-sinking events, she realized there are all sorts of reunions, even casual ones like meeting up on the mailbox path.
Then, once she thought of the song, she wondered how/where Paul Simon chose the phrase “mother and child reunion.”
That opened the floodgates of my reunion-memories reservoir. Like…waiting at Logan Airport for John’s return flight from Cairo after his semester in Egypt, a very happily anticipated reunion. Of course, being my mother’s daughter (and also me), I was busily trying and semi-failing to banish thoughts of his having been kidnapped at the Cairo airport and being held for ransom in a secret crypt of one of the minor pyramids. Anyway, happy anticipation won out by a hair. As it happened, three huge jumbo jets landed at the international terminal at about the same time, so the crowd of waiting people was also huge…lots of them holding little name signs so the disembarkers could find the unknown person who was picking them up.
There was quite a wait, waiters getting antsy, not just me! Finally the flood of arrivals poured down the ramp. Jumbo jets can hold more than 350 passengers, so this was an epic people flood.
Gradually people found their friends, relatives or sign holders. No John. Oh well, there were a thousand people people arriving, plenty still to come. But then the waiting crowd was thinning out, only a few worried looking sign holders left. (I don’t think they were worried about the well-being of the arrival, just worried that they didn’t have bigger signs and the their particular person had missed them and was angrily calling the boss from a taxi wondering why no one was sent to meet them at the airport after flying half way around the world for some stupid conference.)
Meanwhile, my memory reservoirs have tricks of their own, like changing visual memories to cartoons. Like changing kindly avuncular, mustached former principal of the local high school into a walrus in all my memories. (Nothing I can do about this; it’s an independent function of some brain lobe or other.) Anyway, I remember this scene like the end of Close Encounters o the Third Kind, when the lost people of decades walk down the flying-saucer off ramp looking fine but slightly dazed. Then, at long last, there came John, off the space ship…I mean, of course, off the plane…one of the last of the hundreds. Now there was a mother and child reunion!
So where did the phrase “mother and child reunion” come from, if anywhere? After all it’s just a string of ordinary words, not necessarily “from” something. Hmmmm. Answer to be revealed in next email because I don’t think I can fit any more on this, and, also, for dramatic effect.
