The other day I saw a truck full of unsold Mother’s Day cards overturned on the highway.
The sheer spectacle of which was enough for me to pull over.
Thousands of boxes of cards unspooling in 30–50 mph crosswind.
And the eighteen-wheeler on its side in the ditch, surreal as fresh roadkill.
The trucker standing on the shoulder, staring down at his semi, alive but beyond despair.
I hopped out and, on instinct, started trying to save as many of the Mother’s Day cards as I could, thinking I was helping.
The trucker saw me and walked over and told me to stop.
The cards were on their way to the incinerator anyway, he explained, no one had bought them.
He looked at them all blowing away over the trees and added, raising his voice over the wind, “Maybe one of them will end up in the yard of some mother whose prior year of efforts went by without acknowledgment!”
“Maybe she’ll find one of these strays fluttering in the branch of a tree, or on her laundry line, or caught on the wiper blade of her SUV!”
“Maybe she’ll feel some kind of ambient appreciation, a cosmic thanks that will dull the pain of the wound carved into her heart by what her family couldn’t—or wouldn’t—give her!”
The trucker went on in this way for a bit, and at some point in his monologue I began to weep.
I’d lost my own mother recently, and she had definitely been one of the under-appreciated ones—to my unceasing regret ever since.
I asked the man if I could stay while he waited for a tow truck.
He didn’t say no, so I sat on the hood of my car.
Eventually he sat beside me and put a fat hand on my shoulder and told me it would be okay.
Instead of consoling me, it only opened the floodgates.
All my pent up feelings about my own mother came out.
How perfect she was, and how little I had let her know how much I adored her, not for any reason other than my own sheer self-centered laziness, and yet how seeing her as “perfect” now belied the even more tragic fact that I hadn’t really known her at all, for no one is actually perfect.
And how I’d have given anything to know her even just a little bit more.
After I had come to the end of my own monologue, the trucker looked at me cannily and asked if we should see how many Mother’s Day cards we could save.
I glanced over at the strewn, toppled pallet.
There was only one left that had yet to completely unwind.
It was going fast, but hundreds of cards still remained, their plastic wrapping thrashing violently as, one by one, the wind plucked them out and flung them up and over the trees.
I wiped my face and we rose and strode together toward the wild cyclone of cards.
The trucker and I grabbed as many as we could like in one of those cash-grab booths at the mall.
I received multiple paper cuts from the ones I missed, nicking me as they flew past my face like cardstock shurikens.
When our hands were too full to hold any more more, we shoved them into our pockets, our waist, under our hats, and into the ankles of our shoes.
When the last Mother’s Day card blew away, it was too far away for either of us.
Nevertheless, the trucker lunged for it—only to trip and fall.
The big man skidded face-first on the asphalt, but when he rolled over on his back and groaned in pain, I saw that the last Mother’s Day card was clenched, crumpled, in his upturned hand.
I ran over and helped him up.
Stoically ignoring the raspberry marking him from temple to chin, the trucker handed me the card.
On the front was a watercolor of a some kind of bird I don’t know the name of, perched peacefully on the lip of a beautiful stone bird-bath.
Beyond it, in softer focus, was a large and beautiful garden.
The text above the image read “For all the quiet ways you grace our lives, thank you…”
The text was creased and soiled from the trucker grabbing it in a way that only intensified the poignancy of its sentiment.
The inside of the card completed the sentence: “… Happy Mother’s Day”
I handed it back to him, but he held up his hand and told me I should keep it.
I stared at him gratefully then tucked it away.
A post-intimacy awkwardness passed between us in the still unrelenting wind.
I glanced up at the other Mother’s Day cards, all of them now high in the sky and rising like thousands of tiny white birds or angels ascending into heaven.
Shouting over the wind, I asked the trucker if his mother was still alive, and he shouted back that she was.
I told him he was lucky, and he said he knew it.
I then handed him the last card he had just handed me and asked him to give it to his own mother—from me.
He simply stared at me, then he took the card.
Two tow trucks came.
Working in tandem, the towing technicians righted his rig in a cacophony of wrenching steel.
I got back in my car.
The trucker and I waved goodbye as I merged back onto the highway.
I was just as motherless as I had been, but I felt 1–2% more connected to my mother than I had before, which, those of you who have lost your own mother can verify, is a huge coup.