Foretold

A couple of weeks ago, I had the unenviable task of going back to my late mother’s empty house and trying to put it in order.

I won’t be keeping the house, but there were important papers that needed to be found and equipment to be returned and services to be terminated. It was difficult, stepping into someone’s world and feeling as though they had to still be there, because nothing but that one variable — her — had changed. It was something that I tried to make into a disconnected and emotionless exercise, in order to get through it, but of course it wasn’t. Less so because we were so close, because I had seen her so recently, and because it was all so sudden and unexpected.

When I was a child, in the late 70s, my mother worked for a small-time human rights activist as the editor of his magazine. She had a degree in English but she didn’t want to teach and didn’t know how to break into editing genre fiction (I am currently doing, she told me a couple of months ago, her dream job). Ultimately, she ended up making her career as a bookkeeper, but in the late 70s she wasn’t there yet. Instead she was, for a short time, an editor for a magazine.

When I was about six or seven, I ended up going to work with her one day. The office was a beautiful old brownstone in Washington, D.C., but there wasn’t much inside to hold a kid’s attention. To keep me busy, she set me up with copies of her own tools: rubber cement, a pair of scissors, a magazine, and a few blank pages. While she did her cut-and-paste layout for real (since cut-and-paste was literal in those days!), I copied her, cutting magazine ads, pasting them on the blank pages, circling words and red-penciling very important instructions in the margins.

It was just a couple hours of busywork to me, and I forgot all about it. I planned to be a musician — my dream from an early age — and I applied my energy in that direction. I have always loved reading, and to a more private extent, writing, but I fell into publishing and editing only about ten years ago, and found my calling in it more through serendipity than design.

So, it was stunning to find the faded old envelope in with my mother’s important papers, to open it up, and to pull out three crackly sheets of notebook paper bled through with rubber cement and stapled together, and to see on the cover in her neat block print, “GABRIELLE B_____” (my maiden name), “EDITOR.”

Tagged as: editing, mom, personal