Today would have been Mom’s 57th birthday. Time continues to move forward without her; it used to feel like it wouldn’t. But these days come up and I feel compelled to write something.
The other day I was wandering around the aisles of Barnes and Noble, seeing what was new on the shelves, looking for something new to read. When I passed by the Mystery Genre Aisle, the distinctive cover of a new Elizabeth Peters’s Amelia Peabody Mystery caught my eye. Mom loved this series of novels, and it seemed like for many years my siblings, Dad, and I would attempt to be the person who bought the copy of the newest Peabody first so we could give it to Mom for her birthday or Christmas. Not that we didn’t all read the series. When certain new books came to my house you had to be fast before they sneaked off into another’s hands.
The series is set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries during the major archaeological discoveries in Egypt. Mom was fascinated by ancient Egyptian art. During her couple of years at the University of Houston, she had studied art history. I can recall going through one of her old art textbooks with her and her explaining what made Egyptian art unique and interesting.
I had thought that the series though had pretty much finished as the last one was set during the finding of King Tut’s tomb. It actually came out in March 2006, just a few months before Mom died, but I believe my parents had listened to it in the car when they came out for Grandma’s funeral. I remember them talking about it being a good wrap up for the series and how they didn’t think that there’d be any more of the novels.
But then there on the shelves was a new Amelia Peabody mystery. Despite the fact I knew I would buy it, read it and enjoy it, my first thought was how odd it was to not be buying it for my mom’s birthday, because I knew how much she would like it. It’s just one more change in the world that she’d missed. It strikes me that it’s the things she keeps missing that I find hardest to deal with – things like her first grandson to a new novel she would love to read.
But at least when I read a new Amelia Peabody mystery or an old one again, I’ll always remember Mom’s fondness for them and that I read them because she told me they were fun reads first.
The Good German (2006)
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