My mother would always say, “everything that’s ugly has something really beautiful about it. Everything that’s beautiful has something terrible about it.” She still says it―I hear her in my head all the time, but back then, she would say it almost every day.

I remember her sitting there on this one particular occasion, I would later call it the last day of my childhood, her short blonde hair illuminated through the summer day outside. The light of the window like a portal to heaven as she sat and stared through the glass at a little birdfeeder she had filled with mourning dove feed.

I never really loved school―I hated being a student but I loved the teachers…my mom’s a teacher so maybe that’s why, how the heck should I know? But she encouraged me to think about something that was worthwhile that I would want to do for the rest of my life. I was in my senior year, listening to way too much Minor Threat and Dead Kennedys, and didn’t want anybody telling me what to do.

The house smelled like coffee. It usually did. Coffee would have come out of the tap were it up to my mother and I. She was an energetic lady, vivacious, kind, encouraging, stern. Everything you’d want in a mentor and a mother, and turns out everything kids wanted in a teacher too. She was watching those ugly, gray pigeons pecking away at seeds and shitting in the small back yard behind our apartment. I just remember I couldn’t really see her face, and she didn’t notice that I came home.

Her coffee mug was full and cold, which was unusual and next to it was a bag from her favorite Goodwill and a ripped envelope with an opened letter from the hospital.

I always came in loud like I was about to slam dance in a mosh pit, full of restless demons unreleased from a day of school, blasting music from my headphones. But Mom didn’t see me then. She just stared at the mourning doves.

“What are you looking at those ugly pigeons again for, Ma?”

She hardly looked back. I walked up to her and tapped her on the shoulder.

“Oh stop it!” she said almost angry, “everything that’s ugly has something really beautiful about it. Everything that’s beautiful has something terrible about it. I love these little birds.” Her face melted as she saw me, that warm smile. I thought everything would be okay.

“You don’t like coffee suddenly?” 

“Have you picked any of the schools you got into yet, Ralphie? Are you still thinking about teaching?”

“I’m thinking about leading a revolution to overthrow the evils of capitalism, Ma.”

“Well, that’s very nice, but you need to look at colleges too.”

I rolled my eyes at her as I put my bookbag down and sat next to her, stealing her cold coffee.

“Ralphie, it’s late, you’ll be up for ages,” she said.

“Just more time to bring down the system, Ma.”

She looked at me. The light dancing in the late Spring, making her angelic.

“I don’t know, Ma. I just don’t know if I can do that―let alone anything―for thirty years straight.”

“Everyone needs to do something they care about, Ralphie. Indifference is embarrassing.”

“Ma, what’s embarrassing is that you’re still trying to get me to become a part of this capitalist system.”

I remember she smiled, and I knew I couldn’t joke with her anymore, that she was now suddenly serious, a mood that no God nor Saint nor Myth could undo her from.

“Ralphie, my boy,” she stated softly, “who do you want to be?”

I looked down, confused, and probably a bit ashamed. To be honest I had been thinking about purpose too much. Too often. Distracted by it. More distracted by it than chasing girls or what this last summer of childhood would be like. I was obsessed with it―more deranged by it.

“I don’t…know, Ma. That’s the truth.”

She sighed and looked back at the mourning doves. Her hand quickly scooped up the hospital letter and folded it into her pocket. If only I had asked. But I was too worried about the unfolding of my future.

“What is that letter, Ma?” I asked like an empty-headed fool.

“Don’t you worry about it, honey, just some teacher union paperwork, now. Something that won’t change anything.”

I pulled out whatever she had in her shopping bag. It was a painting of a dead girl lying in snow in some Roman Agora, a soldier in the background clutching his spear.

“What the hell is this, Ma? Some dead girl?”

“Oh hush, Ralphie. You’re bordering on sacrilege. That’s Saint Eulalia. A little girl who stood up for God in the face of the Romans.

“Clearly, it didn’t go so well,” I said.

“Hush!” and she smacked me. Lightly. But she smacked me.

I stood up and stepped away from her, glaring. “Ma! What the hell?” She never hit me in my whole life.

She looked at me. The smell of burnt coffee filled my nostrils in the silence. A mourning dove cooed to its devilish delight. I think it felt as though I had got what I had coming to me. If it only knew.

“I have been thinking a lot about purpose lately, Ralphie. And what someone leaves behind. Saint Eulalia believed in God so much, she was willing, just as a little girl, to die for her beliefs. The Romans killed her, and God, to remember her, made it snow on her body, in the middle of summer. It’s a miracle Ralphie. But it’s more than that. It’s…It’s leaving something behind. Something beautiful. Out of all that ugliness, came something beautiful. White snow on a dead girl’s body. That’s terrible. Terrible but beautiful. We all have both of those things in us―the terror, the beauty.”

“I know, Ma. I know, but why’d you hit me? What was that for?”

She exhaled and looked back at those doves.

“You always talk about being lost, Ralphie―that you’re overwhelmed by what’s to come and who you are and who you will be. We all go through that. But sometimes I worry. That’s why I was drawn to this painting.”

I looked at it again. I looked at the face of the dead girl in it. She was on her back, facing the falling snow. But there was reservation in her face. Truancy, resolution.

“I worry what I will leave behind. You worry about what you will become. It’s the same story at two different stages. I realize that you are who I will leave behind. You are my most cherished…thing.”

“That doesn’t mean you get to slap me, Ma, what the hell?”

“You’re right.” She looked at me. “I am sorry. I just want you to find…something. Something you’re excited about.”

“Like teaching?” I asked.

“Like teaching for me, yes―but whatever makes you happy, makes you fulfilled. With is very different from successful. Do you understand?”

I didn’t say anything back. She was often so philosophical those days. That’s when she was always eager to find the beauty in even the most horrifying things.

“Have you ever heard of the myth of Orion?”

“The constellation?”

“Yes, Ralphie, but the myth, not the dots in the winter sky.”

I stayed silent again.

“You see, Orion was Greece’s best hunter. He was successful, famous, talented. But unfulfilled. He wandered the the lands seeking bigger and stronger beasts to hunt. One day he hunted the king’s daughter, Meropa. He did a horrible thing to her.”

I knew that was Mom for ‘raped.’

“You remind me of him is all, Ralphie?”

“What the hell, Ma? First you slap me, know you compare me to a rapist?”

She giggled, a sound like warm wind chimes in the dead of a winter night.

“No, Ralphie. No,” she said, red and embarrassed be the suggestion. “You are unfulfilled like him―or at least I worry you might be. You see, the Gods punished him. They blinded him so that he couldn’t hunt anything anymore. As punishment.”

“So I need punishment? Good, good. Super fair, Ma.”

“No, Ralphie. You need to find the light. You see, the only God that could unblind and heal Orion was Helios, the God of the sun. So Orion wandered the earth blindly, seeking the light. That’s why I think you two are similar. You’re not like him, you’re a wonderful, kind, beautiful person―my boy, my son.” A tear came to her face, and I was confused by her emotion. “I just don’t want you to be lost in the darkness. Wandering forever, trying to find your light. I want you to find it as soon as you can.”

I took that in. I sat back down and gave her a hug.

“Is your purpose to stare at ugly rat birds all day?” I asked.

She laughed again, her tears broken by her joy.

“You know I love what I do,” she said through tears and snickers.

“I know, Mom, but so do so many people…I mean what about the people that find purpose in the wrong things? Like…I don’t know some of the horrible people you teach about.”

“Well you know, this came up in class today. A student wanted me to review Colonel Custer with her.”

“Now there’s the sort I mean! Terrible guy, probably believed in the genocide that he took part of though, didn’t he.”

“You may be right… You may be. But I think, within each of us, there is a conscious choice to live blindly or not to. That in many ways, Custer and Orion are two peas from the same pod. Talented, driven individuals, so driven by their ego that they become blinded by it. None should pity them, but I think we can explain them. I just want you to be conscious of your own blindness―which I think you are… I mainly worry if you’ll never be able to find the sun in all this dark.”

“You make it sound like some Tolkien-like task.”

She looked at me with the magnitude of everest. “Why should it not be?” She smiled. A mourning dove cooed and it melted my heart.

I laughed. “Let me make another pot of coffee, Ma, yours went cold.”