My mother deserves so much of the earthly credit for who I am. I am so grateful for all the hours she patiently let me talk about things she never even pretended to understand. I was thirteen, doing my science project on relativity, trying to see what four dimensions looked like. How could a circular orbit around the sun be a “straight line” (or a “geodesic”) in “spacetime”? She let me wrestle with it, out loud, over many dishfuls of dishes.
I never did wind up doing fundamental physics or biochemistry. Still don’t have that Nobel Prize yet. But the adolescent mind that got stretched out to four dimensions at thirteen, with the help of a tolerant mother, is still stretching. Today I think there are more likely to be twelve dimensions than four, and relativity seems as basic as algebra–and Mom still doesn’t pretend to understand what I’m talking about…
But she still loves me, still prays for me, and still makes me glad I’m her son.
Happy Mother’s Day!