Moms

Me, in Nagoya, Japan, 1986. It's a warm spring afternoon, a Sunday, and I go to a park near the apartment building I live in. Japan is not noted for having much greenery in urban areas, and Nagoya, which is known for its manufacturing of cars, is not an exception. When I go to my office to pick up teaching supplies, I look out the ninth-floor window and am amazed that all I see, stretching to the horizon, is concrete and glass.
Back to the park. I'm enjoying sitting in the shade and I'm reading a book, looking up now and then to people watch. I look up and see a woman and her daughter. The daughter is around six or seven. They have a rubber ball with them and they begin to throw it back and forth, the trajectory the ball makes an invisible cord connecting the two. The girl is delighted with every catch and throw. The mother is as delighted. Both laugh with pure pleasure.
Nothing I ever saw made me want to be a parent more than this, but I never became a parent despite that, as much as I tried.

Children's Letters to the Loser #14

Dear Complete and Total Loser,

I have no idea what to get my mother for Mother's Day. Everything I've gotten her in the past just ends up in the closet, and making things for her makes me feel silly because I'm 14 years old. I don't have enough money to get her something really nice. Any advice?

Brittni

Dear Brittni,

As the (yes, the) regular reader of The Complete and Total Loser knows, the Loser's mother died less than seven months ago and his father died less than two months after that, so he's been thinking a lot about Mother's Day as this will be his first one without a mother. 

The Loser is his family's iconoclast and has never been a fan of what he -- and others -- call "department store holidays" like Mother's Day and Father's Day. Then again, the Loser doesn't like Christmas or birthdays either. He believes we should revel in appreciation for our parents, desire for universal goodwill and the passage of time on a daily basis. But the majority disagrees and it can be wearing sometimes to constantly explain and defend yourself. Be creative with your gift. I have dozens of ideas, but telling you them would rob you of the chance to come up with your own, so I'll just quote a favorite bumper sticker: The important things in life aren't things. 

Yours,

The Complete and Total Loser

The Bath by Mary Cassatt, 1893