Author: Hoyle

This morning everyone here awoke in a new body. It might not have felt new (I know mine didn’t) but it was. Over 330 billion of your cells have been replaced from the set you had yesterday morning. In a hundred days that total matches the count of the all cells in your body, making all of us, statistically speaking, infants! Of course not all cells are replaced at the same rate, but it’s fundamentally true that you are not who you were yesterday, or last week, or last year. As Richard Feynman said “today’s brains are yesterday’s mashed potatoes.” They have to learn what you were like as a child, and whether you like broccoli.

Your energy too is not really your own. Some of your breakfast is now seeping out of you to warm your pew. You use this energy constantly when you walk or blink or think. It’s borrowed from the universe and returned in a different form.

If you were to look at your skin under a microscope, you’d find that this imaginary line that separates you from the rest of the universe is really quite porous. Those of you with allergies are particularly aware of this fact.

So, what then, are we?

I’ve thought about this a great deal, and I’d like to share these thoughts with you.

I observe that we are pattern identifiers, pattern assimilators, pattern vessels, and pattern transmitters. We are a flow.

Now you are listening to these words I didn’t invent, standing on a platform built by hands I’ve never seen, made from trees which grew under a sun I never saw. My words are an echo of humans past, being converted into a literal echo by my “mashed potatoes,” bouncing into your ears. And hopefully some of these words are lodging in your own mashed potatoes.

We are but a temporary assemblage of cells, and energy, and thoughts, and the actions that those provoke and permit. By thought and word and deed we become parts of each other, and part of an unbroken human organism stretching back to the dawn of humanity.

We are an eddy current in a river, neither the water nor the river itself.

So, who was she? I can’t give a complete answer, but I’ll share a few things.

I got my first job at eight years old working at the coal mine.

Just kidding, there’s no coal mine in Chapel Hill. Really it was my sister’s job, which was delivering the Village Advocate, a free classified newspaper. The papers needed to be rolled up, secured with a rubber band, and hung from the front door of the fifty houses on the street where we lived, two days a week on Wednesday, and especially early on Sunday mornings. My sister initially took on this job, but she quickly realized she didn’t want to get up that early on Sundays, so, I took over that day. Back then, I was a tiny little thing, always the smallest kid in my class, the one who had to hold the sign in class pictures. I didn’t get a whole lot bigger.

Mom helped me a lot. She would drive her big, mustard-yellow Dodge Aspen station wagon up and down the street carrying the papers in the car, so I could deliver a few at a time before returning for more. And she never asked for a cut of the $3.15 a week I earned, which was pretty good money for an eight-year-old.

Before long, I was able to carry all the papers myself, and I also took over the Wednesday route from my sister, around the time she started lifeguarding at the Exchange Pool. Mom taught me to swim there, starting at the wall and backing up a few steps for me to swim to her. One day when I was four, she kept backing up, and backing up, and BACKING UP, until I swam the entire length of the pool. I still remember how furious I was with her that day. I was on the swim team within weeks.

My second job also came when I was young. There was an opportunity to work at the local computer store. My dad was a mainframe programmer, and I was always interested in our home computers, and mom thought it would be a good fit for me. She arranged for a special work permit since I was underage, of course knowing the right person to sweet-talk. She drove me back and forth to work until I could drive myself. I took home only half what I made, with the other half going to pay off the parts for the computer I built for myself. That job gave me a huge head start on my current computer career.

Mom always knew somebody. Her memory for people and trivia was amazing. She often won prizes on WCHL radio, sometimes enlisting me or my sister to call in because she had already won too many times that month.

One time a few weeks into a new school year she was substituting in an elementary school class and arrived a bit late (though it was likely not her fault, as she was never late). The kids, having heard they would have a substitute, had all sat in different seats with someone else’s name in front of them. Mom, without missing a beat, called every single kid by their correct name, saying nothing about their attempt to trick her.

When a kid in one of her classes misbehaved, she might say, ‘How do you think your older brother Johnny would feel about the way you’re behaving right now?’
” *GASP* you know Johnny?!”
Of course, she knew Johnny. And, she had taught their mom and dad, and remembered where they liked to vacation, and their favorite kind of cake. And you can bet if that kid didn’t straighten up they’d be getting a phone call after school.

She had a knack for pulling strings, not with power or influence, but because she was well-connected and respected. People knew if she asked for something, it probably made sense for it to be so.

She always wanted the best for people, sometimes whether they liked it or not.

In my early teens, I met a cute girl at the library and mentioned her to my mom. The next day I found my mom on the phone with her mother, having a conversation about how nice it was that their kids had met.

I was mortified.

Once I’d had a bit of a crush on two sisters at youth group, right downstairs from here. There was a rare event with both kids and their parents in attendance, and I did NOT want mom there, for fear of embarrassment. I recognized the father of these two sisters and said “Hi Doctor K” and he replied “Hi Hoyle, how’s your cyst?”

I was mortified.

You see, he wasn’t *my* doctor, but Mom probably asked him for a second opinion.

My cyst is fine now.

It’s one of the reasons I chose to move away, to have a life not just as her son but as myself. She had a vast spy network. She cast a big shadow under her broad and welcoming wings.

She always knew the way she wanted things and wasn’t shy about letting you know when she disapproved. She had a well-practiced SIGH that I can still hear clearly.

As a substitute, she knew every teacher and every child in the entire school system, every year, for decades. I think she could have been mayor if she wanted, just by calling everyone she knew and talking to them until they agreed to vote for her.

She WAS a talker… When a stroke took her words, it didn’t take all of them. When she lost the word ‘walk’, she’d say ‘I would like to perambulate.’ I remember thinking, ‘If you can find ‘perambulate’ but not ‘walk’, then absolutely, we can go for a walk.’

A couple of summers ago I got to meet part of my mom on an organic farm in Portland Oregon. I was visiting a friend who was very close with me until he moved to California in sixth grade, which, for a sixth grader might as well be the Moon. We hadn’t seen each other in decades, but as we reconnected, walking among his fruit trees and donkeys and goats, he told me that when his parents divorced my mom took care of him and his brother. As a child I hadn’t realized that “my friends coming over to play” was in another sense “babysitting them for their dad” and I hadn’t had cause to reconsider it until that moment. You see, his dad had custody, but this being the early 80’s he didn’t know how to shop or cook or clean the house, or raise two boys alone. My friend called her his “second mom.” Thirty five years later, on the other side of the country, there she was.

We are a wave on the sea. A temporary disturbance which travels a great distance before crashing on the shore. We cannot exist without the water, or the sea, or the shore, but we connect them all in our own unique way.

So then, I am quite sure that my mother is not buried in a box in the garden, but sitting here in all of you. And, in all of those who knew her who could not be here today.

When you remember her, you carry her with you.
When you love each other, you love her too.
When you act, think about her actions, and those of others you’ve admired.

She wanted the best for everyone, and wanted things to be the right way. Oh yes, she had rose colored glasses, but that meant she always saw the best in people, because she was looking for it. She saw their potential and helped them see it too. She never dwelled on negative thoughts, always finding something to praise or look forward to.

I knew her as a mother, who read to me while I sat on her lap, until I was so big I was really just sitting on the arm of her La-z-boy. A mother who supported me at every turn, so that no matter where I was, I knew I could aways come home. (She would frequently remind me how nice the weather was in Chapel Hill.)

But I did NOT know her as a classmate, a bridge partner, a board member at the pool, a teacher in the break room, a girl scout leader, a wife, a sister or a child. Or a thousand other things.

Although parts of her are lost, reflections of the wave remain, even after crashing on the shore.

You have the opportunity… the responsibility, to decide what parts of her to carry with you, in your mashed potatoes.

We are all unique waves.
Let’s be waves mom would be proud of.

Thank you.